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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY STUDIES 

IN 

Historical and Political Science 

HERBERT B. ADAMS, Editor 



History is past Politics and Politics present History — Freeman 



SECOND SERIES 
IV 

SAMUEL ADAMS 



The Man of the Town-Meeting 



By JAMES K. HOSMER, A. M. 



BALTIMORE 

N. Murray, Publication Agent, Johns Hopkins University 

APRIL, 1884 



Johns Hopkins University Studies 

IN 

Historical and Political Science. 

HERBERT B. ADAMS, Editor. 



History is past Politics and Politics present History. — Freeman. 



PROSPECTUS OF THE SECOND SERIES. 

1884. 

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monthly monographs devoted to Institutions, Economics, and Politics, is hereby 
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Studies will be sold separately, although at higher rates than to subscribers for 
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be issued in June. The order of subsequent papers is not yet fully determined, 
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IV 



SAMUEL ADAMS 



The Man of the Town-Meeting 



" The old Teutonic Assembly rose again to full life in the New England town-meeting." — 
Freeman. 

" Samuel Adams, the helmsman of the Revolution at its origin, the truest representative 
of the home rule of Massachusetts in its town-meetings and General Court."— Bancroft. 

" A man whom Plutarch, if he had only lived late enough, would have delighted to 
include in his gallery of worthies, — a man who in the history of the American Revolu- 
tion is second only to Washington,— Samuel Adams." — John Fiske. 



i^r, 



JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY STUDIES 

IN 

Historical and Political Science 

HERBERT B. ADAMS, Editor 



History is past Politics and Politics present History — Freeman 



SECOND SERIES 
IV 

SAMUEL ADAMS 



The Man of the Town-Meeting 

By JAMES K. HOSMER, A. M. 

Professor of English and German Literature, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. 



Ay *} J Z a 

JUN 1011884 

BALTIMORE 

N. Murray, Publication Agent, Johns Hopkins University 

A PHIL, 18 8 4 



L mi 

.6 



JOHN MURPHY & CO., PRINTERS, 
BALTIMORE. 



SAMUEL ADAMS, 
THE MAN OF THE TOWN-MEETING. 1 



The Folk-Mote. 



"We are taught by the science of our time that if any- 
organic body be analyzed, we reach at length the primordial 
cell ; beyond this it is impossible to go. Like the body of a 
tree or the body of a man, so a body-politic has its primor- 
dial cell. 2 What is the proper primordial cell of a free 
Anglo-Saxon state ? 

In transacting the business of a nation, the mass of the 
people can act only through representatives, the sovereign or 
president who is put in the supreme place, — the Congress or 
Parliament, who are set to make the laws. As regards the 
sub-divisions of a nation, even in transacting the business of 
a county, things are quite too large and complicated to be 
managed in any other way than by delegates appointed for 
that purpose. But somewhere the people ought to act of 
themselves. "It is not by instinct," says a wise writer, 3 
whose words are here abridged, " that men are able to form a 
proper judgment as to the qualifications and acts of their rep- 



1 This paper is based on studies for a new life of Samuel Adams. 

2 Herbert B. Adams : " The Germanic Origin of New England Towns,' 
p. 5. 

3 J. Toulmin Smith, "Local Self-Go vernment and Centralization," p 



6 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [208 

resentatives. Such judgment can never be got by men in 
any other way than by habitual and free discussion, among 
themselves, of similar subjects. Through a certain inde- 
pendence of thought, and conduct, to be only acquired by 
being continually called on to talk and act in public affairs, 
do men become fit to elect representatives and judge of their 
conduct. Representative assemblies must exist for the more 
convenient carrying on of business, but regular, fixed, fre- 
quent, and accessible meetings of the individual freemen 
should also take place, in which public matters shall be laid 
before the people, by them to be discussed, and approved or 
disapproved. It is such local self-government that affords 
the most valuable education, both as to thought and action; 
the faculties of man will have this as their best school. As 
long as everything is done for them, men have no occasion to 
think at all, and will soon become incapable of thinking : but 
the moment they are thrown on their own resources, they 
wake from their torpor. It becomes necessary that they 
should act ; and to act, they must think. 

No name was ever devised which more fully expressed a 
reality than the word " Folk-mote," discussion by the assem- 
bled people. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon laws, indeed, in 
the earliest accounts of the Teutons, we find continual refer- 
ence to the " Folk-mote," and long after the coming of Wil- 
liam the Conqueror, the thing is to be traced. 1 It was the 
duty, enforced by penalties, of every man, to attend his 
Folk-mote, in order to discharge there the responsibilities 
which attached to him as a member of the state. There 
existed in England a system of local self-government by 
which there were fixed, frequent, and accessible meetings 
together of the folk or people, for discussing and determining 



1 Tacitus : Germania, XI. Waitz : Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 
Band I, 4. Freeman : Growth of English Constitution, p. 17. Mar : Con- 
stitutional History of England, II, 460. Phillips : Geschichte des Angel- 
sachsischen Kechts, p, 12. 



209] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 7 

upon all matters of common interest, — a system, the skeleton 
of which still exists, though it has been much overlaid. The 
fact is clear and unmistakable that there existed a system of 
local self-government minutely ramified and wisely devised 
so that there should be meetings together of the people in 
every part for the common purposes of getting justice nigh- 
at-hand, and also of understanding, discussing, and determin- 
ing upon all matters of common interest." 

This Folk-mote it is which lies, or should lie, at the foun- 
dation of everything in an Anglo-Saxon free state. For con- 
venience' sake, in carrying on large affairs, representation 
must come Jn ; but below that must be the assembly of the 
people, discussing and judging the public business, their 
interest roused, their faculties trained, from the fact that they 
so discuss and judge. This is the Primordial Cell of an 
Anglo-Saxon body-politic — this Folk-mote. Can the Folk- 
mote be found in America ? 

At the time of the colonization of America, the old self- 
government of the people had been, in England, in great part 
lost. The responsibility for the misfortune was a double one. 
It rested to some extent with the people themselves, who for- 
got their birth-right, — to some extent also with the kings and 
great men, who forgot they were only ministers of the people 
and assumed to be their masters. The sixteenth century and 
the first years of the seventeenth century found on the throne 
of England a race of kings who believed they ruled jure 
divino, owning little responsibility to the people in their 
exercise of power ; the people had few rights, in the idea of 
these sovereigns, which they were bound to respect. Let us 
look at the colonies which were sent forth at this time. When 
the founders of New England established themselves, they did 
not reproduce the state of things they had left behind, nor on 
the other hand did they invent something new. They went 
back to those old ways which the English had to so large an 
extent forsaken. The little company of poor men had signed 
the compact in the cabin of the " Mayflower," to be mutually 



8 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [210 

bound by laws which all were to have a voice in framing, 
had set foot on the lonely bowlder, which now seems almost 
likely to be worn away by the reverent trampling of the 
multitudes who visit it, and exploring for a little, had built 
their camp-fires at last where sweet water gushed freely from 
the bosom of a hill. They felt forgotten by the world. Doing 
what was easiest to be done, following traditions which, so to 
speak, had come down in their blood, they set apart certain 
land to be held in common, a homestead for each man, built 
a fort of timber on the hill close by, ran their palisade where 
danger seemed most to, threaten, established certain simple 
rules, and lo, when all was done, the little settlement was 
throughout, as to internal constitution and external features, 
essentially the same as an Anglo-Saxon "tun" or "burn," 
such as a boat-load of the followers of Hengist or Cerdic 
might have set up, as they coasted, searching for a home, 
along the isle of Thanet — or further back still, the same 
essentially as a village of the Weser shore or the Odenwald, 
set up in the primeval heathen days. 1 

When, ten years later, Winthrop with his followers came 
to settle Boston, they were richer, more numerous, better 
educated, but it was convenient for them, too, to go back to 
the old forms. Ship followed ship, almost unnoticed in the 
old world, where the minds of men were absorbed in the 
struggle between king and parliament, which presently burst 
into war. Twenty-one thousand, at length, sailing toward 
the beckoning finger of Cape Cod, had found a refuge in 
Massachusetts bay. They spread from the coast into the 
interior, through blazed paths of the forest, led by Indian 
guides to rich intervales in distant valleys, clustering about 
water- falls where fish abounded and where the grain could be 
ground, or in spots where there seemed a chance for mining. 
What determined the size of the towns was always conven- 



J Edward A. Freeman : Introd. to American Institut. History, p. 15. 
Herbert B. Adams : Germanic Origin of N. E. Towns. 



211] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 9 

ience in getting to the Sunday meeting; for to church all 
were obliged to go, under penalty of fine or severe punish- 
ment. More often than not on the summit of some hill the 
meeting-house was built. The valleys, heavy with forest, 
were swampy and dangerous. As the country has cleared, 
the morasses have dried and the valleys have become the 
pleasant places ; but in many an old town, the meeting-house 
remains perched on its summit, away from the modern dwell- 
ings which it has been more suitable, at length, to place in 
the low land. Where the meeting-house is with the dwell- 
ings, one can often find, hunting .among the huckleberry 
bushes on the deserted hill-top close by, the foundation of 
the first temple, reared before the Indians and the wolves 
were gone. About in the territory, never so far away that it 
would be inconvenient on Sunday to go to meeting, the popu- 
lation spread itself. The twenty-one thousand that sought 
the wilderness were at first neglected, in good part lost sight 
of. Left to themselves, each group of inhabitants bound 
together about the meeting-house, near which generally rose 
also the school, contrived, for the regulation of affairs which 
interested all alike, the forms which came most handy, and 
these were the forms in England to so large an extent 
crowded out, — the Folk-mote with its accompaniments, the 
local self-government of the Anglo-Saxon days, revived with 
a faithfulness of which the colonists themselves were not at 
all conscious. At last in the middle of the last century, the 
mother country suddenly became aware that her American 
children had grown rich and powerful. In the great wars 
with France, when Louisburg, and at last Quebec, were cap- 
tured, and England became mistress of the continent, the 
colonies furnished a great army, who marched and fought 
with the British regulars, and helped as much as they to the 
victories that were gained. Their vessels, too, were upon 
every sea. On the coast and in the interior, the towns, at first 
so feeble, were growing large and rich. "They must be 
looked to more closely," Said the English rulers. "Their 



10 Samuel Adams, the 3 fan of the Town-Meeting. [212 

trade must be regulated, so that England can reap an advan- 
tage from it ; they must be taxed to help pay for these great 
wars we have been waging largely on their account," and so 
began the series of events that brought, in '76, the freedom of 
America. 

At that time, in Massachusetts, then including Maine, and 
containing 210,000 white inhabitants, more than were found 
in any other American colony, there were more than two 
hundred towns, whose constitution is thus described by a 
writer of the revolutionary period : x " Every town is an 
incorporated republic. Xhe selectmen by their own author- 
ity, or upon the application of a certain number of towns- 
men, issue a warrant for the calling of a town-meeting. The 
warrant mentions the business to be engaged in, and no other 
can be legally executed. The inhabitants are warned to 
attend; and they that are present, though not a quarter or 
tenth of the whole, have a right to proceed. They choose a 
president by the name of Moderator, who regulates the pro- 
ceedings of the meeting. Each individual has an equal 
liberty of delivering his opinion, and is not liable to be 
silenced or brow-beaten by a richer or greater townsman than 
himself. Every freeman or free-holder gives his vote or not, 
and for or against, as he pleases; and each vote weighs 
equally, whether that of the highest or lowest inhabitant. 
. . . All the New England towns are on the same plan in 
general." 

" A New England town-meeting," says E. A. Freeman, "is 
essentially the same thing as the Eolk-mote." 2 Shall we find 
the Folk-mote in the other colonies? Turning first to Vir- 
ginia, 3 the great representative colony of the South, as Massa- 
chusetts is of the North, in the eighteenth century we find here 
an ordered life, though the heterogeneous character of the 



1 Gordon : History of Independence of IT. S., I, 262. 

2 Amer. Institut. History, p. 16. 

3 John Esten Cooke : " Virginia.' 5 



213] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 11 

colony makes the task of description a less simple one than in 
the case of her Northern sister. Virginia contains 173,000 
whites, and 120,000 blacks. In what is called the " Tidewater- 
region," there appears at the top of society an aristocracy of 
landed proprietors, a society constituted after the model exist- 
ing at the same time in England, and not at all reviving the 
features of the more ancient period, as was done in Massachu- 
setts. 1 The law of primogeniture being rigidly maintained, 
each great estate, consisting often of thousands of acres, 
descends in each generation to the eldest son, his brothers and 
sisters being slightly portioned, if at all. There are indeed 
small farmers in the Tidewater-region, a class springing in 
part from unportioned younger sons, in part from later 
immigrants, who are at a disadvantage as to getting hold of 
the soil : this class, hoivever, is unimportant as compared 
with the landed magnates, with whom lies all social pres- 
tige, and for the most part, political power. 

The particular form into which society in Virginia ar- 
ranges itself, is much affected by the special industry to 
which the colony has become almost exclusively devoted, the 
raising of tobacco. On the great estates the laborious process 
of producing the invariable crop can be most conveniently 
left to the hands of negroes. Everything favors the develop- 
ment of slavery, and slaves soon come to make up nearly 
half of the population. In a condition not very different 
from that of the slaves are the indented white servants. 
These are penniless immigrants, sometimes English convicts 
or paupers, shipped to the New World and bound out for a 
term of years by the government, — sometimes people of more 
respectable antecedents, who in return for their passage- 
money freely give themselves into practical serfdom. In 
these circumstances, labor necessarily falls into disrepute : a 
class of poor whites arises, descendants of those so unfortu- 
nately placed as to be unable to obtain land or of those who 

1 E. A. Freeman : Amer. Institut. Hist., p. 17. 



12 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [214 

lack energy to do so, who squat on the plantations in out-of- 
the-way swamps or woods, push into the wilderness as 
hunters and trappers, or tramp as roving vagabonds from 
estate to estate. 

In striking contrast with Massachusetts, there is in Vir- 
ginia no town-life. Norfolk, with about 7,000 people, is the 
only place of importance. Williamsburg has no consequence 
except as the point at which the House of Burgesses meets, 
and the seat of the College of William and Mary. The 
inhabitants are scattered throughout the vast counties, with 
no rallying-points, but the manor-houses of the planters. Of 
manufacturing of any kind there is no trace, and the class of 
honorable merchants is almost unknown. It is indispensa- 
ble to each great plantation that it should be accessible from 
the sea, a condition easily supplied through the magnificent 
streams which aiford paths everywhere into the interior from 
the Chesapeake. Each planter has his own wharf and ware- 
house, to which his negroes bring yearly at harvest the great 
tobacco-yield, while English or Yankee ships, freighted with 
foreign manufactures to be given in exchange, lie ready to 
receive it. 

The typical Virginian at the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury was devoted to the English king and church. If he 
possessed overweening family pride, extravagance, and con- 
tempt for work, he had also the splendid virtues of a cava- 
lier class, generosity, bravery and hospitality. He was often 
highly accomplished, with acquirements and graces brought 
from the schools of England, to which many a Virginia boy 
was sent ; or if that opportunity were denied, the College of 
William and Mary was quite able to impart an elegant cul- 
ture. Even the poor whites, forlorn as they were for all 
purposes of peaceful, well-ordered society, possessed qualities 
which fitted them admirably to be frontiersmen and soldiers. 
Many a planter could claim descent from historic stock ; and 
sometimes, as in the case of the old Lord Fairfax, who estab- 
lished for himself a broad sylvan domain in the valley of the 



215] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 13 

Shenandoah, and lived there like the banished duke of " As 
You Like It" in the " Forest of Arden," the blood of the 
Virginians was of the noblest. 

There was, however, another Virginia than that of the 
Tidewater-region. 'Into the valley between the Blue Ridge 
and the Alleghanies, and even farther west, just before the 
Revolution, immigrants were beginning to press. Part of 
them were Germans, a rill from the current which was pour- 
ing into Central Pennsylvania ; part were Scotch Irish, kin- 
dred of the men who defended Londonderry against James 
II. These had little, sympathy or share with the Old 
Dominion. The Germans were rigid Lutherans and thor- 
oughly peasants ; the Scotch Irish were of no higher social 
rank and strict Presbyterians. The cares and dangers of 
frontier life quite absorbed them. If their representatives 
were in the House of Burgesses, there is little trace of it. 
When the Revolution had once fairly begun, indeed, pastor 
Muhlenberg led his flock from the Shenandoah valley to 
battle for the cause of the colonies, and Daniel Morgan with 
his stalwart riflemen, in buckskin and fringe, stood from first 
to last as the very flower of the American troops, by the side 
of Washington ; but these frontiersmen were of another spirit 
than their eastern neighbors. 

If we contrast now the colonial life of Virginia with that 
of Massachusetts, we shall find some marked differences. 
The isolation of the great estates at the South made it out of 
the question for the men to come together as in the compact 
communities of the North ; the more heterogeneous character 
of society in the former case, moreover, interfered with the 
disposition to come together. Instead, therefore, of a state 
made up of small democratic communities, within each one 
of which the men, gathered in town-meeting, governed them- 
selves, a state came to pass the people of which had little 
opportunity or desire for the general discussion of public 
measures ; care for political matters was, in the mass of men, 
very slight, from the fact that a class small in. number almost 



14 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [216 

monopolized property and power. The territorial mag- 
nates were all-in-all. In the House of Burgesses at Wil- 
liamsburg, the great planters came together and few besides. 
Among them, indeed, political interest was keen enough. 
Each had a great stake in the country ; each was accustomed 
to power and fond of wielding it. In this aristocratic legis- 
lature the energy was great, and the spirit of freedom very 
manifest. The royal governors found the body often intrac- 
table; constant bickering prevailed between them and the 
Assembly, through which the latter learned the habit of call- 
ing into question the authority of the king, and also came to 
love an atmosphere of strife. Hence, when the mother-land 
grew arbitrary, none were more prompt than the House of 
Burgesses of Virginia to call the king and his ministers to 
account. At the outbreak of war they came quickly to the 
front. America took its leader from among them, and dur- 
ing the first years of our independence Virginia was "the 
mother of presidents." 

In the New England Legislatures, each delegate, in no wise 
superior to those who sent him in wealth or position, stood 
for the little democracy, the Folk-mote, the town that sent 
him. He was not his own man except in so far as his superior 
ability or character made his townsmen give way to him. He 
was carefully instructed what course he must pursue; was 
liable to sharp censure if he went against the wishes of his 
closely-watching constituents, and each year must submit him- 
self anew to the suffrages of his townsmen, who promptly con- 
signed him to private life if his course had been disapproved. 

There was then no Folk-mote in Virginia. In all of the 
thirteen colonies, as regards this proper primordial cell of 
a republican body politic, it existed in well-developed form 
only in the New England town-meeting. Of the group of 
Southern Colonies, while in the case of each there were 
peculiarities of constitution, 1 as regards the present point 

1 B. James -Bamuge: Local Government in South Carolina.. - 



217] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 15 

Virginia may be taken as the type. Nor in the Middle 
Colonies is the case much different. In New York the 
Dutch were long enough in possession to stamp upon the 
settlement an impress not at all democratic. Along the Hud- 
son, the patroons, on their estates fronting sixteen miles on the 
river and running back indefinitely, had established a kind of 
feudal system, which the German settlers who came later into 
the valley of the Mohawk, and the waifs from all lands, who 
with the English occupied the neighborhood of Manhattan, 
did little to modify. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, the 
great proprietaries were subordinate monarchs beneath an 
English suzerainty, exercising a rule over a population con- 
taining many elements besides English, which was far from 
favorable to democracy. Throughout the length and breadth 
of the thirteen colonies then, at the time of the Revolution, 
New England stood alone in having restored a primitive 
liberty which had been superseded, her little democracies 
governing each itself after a fashion for which there was no 
precedent without going back to the Folk-mote of a remote 
day — to a time before the kings of England began to be 
arbitrary and before the people became indifferent to their 
birth-right. 

Have New Englanders preserved their town-meeting? 
Thirteen million, or about one-quarter of the inhabitants of 
the United States, are believed to be descendants of the 21,000, 
who, in the dark days of Stuart domination, came from 
among the friends of Cromwell and Hampden, to people the 
North-East. In large proportion they have forsaken their 
old seats, following the parallels of latitude along the lakes 
into the great North- West, and now at length across the 
continent to California and Oregon. At the beginning of the 
century, Grayson wrote to Madison 1 that a the New Eng- 
landers are amazingly attached to their custom of planting by 
townships/ 7 So it has always been : wherever New Eng- 

1 Bancroft : Hist, of Constitution, I., p. 181. 



16 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [218 

landers have had power to decide as to the constitution of a 
forming state, it has had at the basis the township. But in 
the immense dilution which this element of population has 
constantly undergone, through the human flood from all lands, 
which, side by side with it, has poured into the new territo- 
ries, its influence has of necessity been often greatly weak- 
ened, and the form of the township has been changed from 
the original pattern, seldom advantageously. 1 In New Eng- 
land itself, moreover, a similar cause has modified some- 
what the old circumstances. While multitudes of the ancient 
stock have forsaken the granite hills, their places have been 
supplied by a Celtic race, energetic and prolific, whose teeming 
families throng city and village, threatening to outnumber 
the Yankee element, depleted as it has been by the emigration 
of so many of its most vigorous children. To these new- 
comers must be added now the French Canadians, who, follow- 
ing the track of their warlike ancestors down the river-val- 
leys, have come by thousands into the manufacturing towns 
and into the woods, an industrious but unprogressive race, 
good hands in the mills and marvellously dextrous at wield- 
ing the axe. Whatever may be said of the virtues of these 
new-comers, and, of course, a long list could be made out 
for them, they have not been trained to Anglo-Saxon self- 
government. We have seen the origin of the Folk-mote 
far back in Teutonic antiquity. As established in New Eng- 
land, it is a revival of a most ancient thing. The institution 
is uncongenial to any but Teutonic men ; the Irishman and 
Frenchman are not at home in it, and cannot accustom them- 
selves to it, until, as the new generations come forward, they 
take on the characteristics of the people among whom they 
have come to cast their lot. At present, in most old New 



1 S. A. Galpin : Walker's Statistical Atlas of U. S., II, 10. Albert Shaw : 
Local Government in Illinois. E. W. Bemis : Local Government in Michi- 
gan and the North-west. E. E. L. Gould : Local Government in Pennsyl- 
vania. 



219] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 17 

England towns, we find an element of the population num- 
bering hundreds, often thousands, who are sometimes quite 
inert, allowing others to decide all things for them ; some- 
times voting in droves in an unintelligent way as some 
whipper-in may direct ; sometimes in unreasoning partisan- 
ship following through thick and thin a cunning demagogue, 
quite careless how the public welfare may suffer by his com- 
ing to the front. 

Still another circumstance which threatens the Folk-mote 
is the multiplication of cities. When a community of moder- 
ate size which has gone forward under its town-meeting, at 
length increases so far as to be entitled to a city charter, the 
day is commonly hailed by ringing of bells and salutes of 
cannon. But the assuming of a city charter has been 
declared to be "an almost complete abnegation of practical 
democracy. The people cease to govern themselves ; once a 
year they choose those who are to govern for them. Instead 
of the town-meeting discussions and votes, one needs now to 
spend only ten minutes, perhaps, in a year. No more listen- 
ing to long debates about schools, roads, and bridges. One 
has only to drop a slip of paper, containing a list which 
some one has been kind enough to prepare for him, into a 
box, and he has done his duty as a citizen." 1 In the most 
favorable circumstances, the mayor and common-council, rep- 
resenting the citizens, do the work for them, while individ- 
uals are discharged from the somewhat burdensome, but so 
educating and quickening duties of the Folk-mote. As yet 
the way has not been discovered through which in an Ameri- 
can city, the primordial cell of our liberty may be preserved 
from atrophy. 

Boston Town. 

If one wishes to study the American Folk-mote, the Town- 
meeting, with care, he will turn then to some town of New 

1 New York Nation: May 29, 1866. 

2 



18 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [220 

England. To find a town at its most characteristic stage, ho 
will not, for reasons that have been mentioned, take it as it 
stands at present ; nor, on the other hand, will it be well to 
go back to the earliest period, when things were forming. 
The New England town is best presented at an intermediate 
point when it has had time to become fully developed, and 
before the causes have begun to operate which have largely 
changed it. The period of the Revolution, in fact, is the 
epoch that must be selected ; and the town of towns in which 
everything that is most distinctive appears most plainly, is 
Boston. 

Boston was a town, governed by its Folk-mote, almost 
from its foundation until 1822, more than one hundred and 
eighty years. In 1822, when the inhabitants numbered forty 
thousand, it reluctantly became a city, giving up its town- 
meetings because they had grown so large as to be unmanage- 
able, — the people choosing a mayor and common-council to 
do the public business for them, instead of doing it them- 
selves. The records of the town of Boston, carefully pre- 
served from the earliest times, lie open to public inspection 
in the office of the city -clerk. Whoever pores over these 
records, on the yellow paper, in the faded ink, as it came 
from the pens of the ancient town-clerks, will find that for 
the first hundred years, the freemen are occupied for the most 
part with their local concerns. How the famous cow-paths 
pass through the phases of their evolution — footway, country- 
lane, high-road, — until at length they become the streets and 
receive dignified names. What ground shall be taken for 
burying-places, and how it shall be fenced as the little settle- 
ment gradually covers the whole peninsula, — how the Neck, 
then a very consumptive looking neck, not goitred by a ward 
or two of brick and mortar-covered territory, may be pro- 
tected, so that it may not be guillotined by some sharp north- 
easter, — what precautions shall be taken against the spread of 
small-pox, — who shall see to it that dirt shall not be thrown 
into the town-dock, — that inquiry shall be made whether 



221] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 19 

Latin may not be better taught in the public-schools, — such 
topics as these are considered. The town-clerks always make 
a particular point of describing the " visitation of the schools." 
The selectmen invite every year, in May, a long list, some- 
times forty or fifty, comprising the great people of the Pro- 
vince, with any notable strangers there may be in town, to be 
present at the. inspection. For the most part, the record is 
tedious and unimportant detail for a modern reader, though 
now and then in an address to the sovereign, or a document 
that implies all is not harmony between the town and royal 
governor, the horizon broadens a little. But soon after the 
middle of the eighteenth century, the record largely changes. 
William Cooper, at length, begins his service of forty-nine 
years as town-clerk, starting out in 1761, with a bold, round 
hand, which gradually becomes faint and tremulous as the 
writer descends into old age. One may well turn over the 
musty pages here with no slight feeling of awe, for it is the 
record, made at the moment, of one of the most memorable 
struggles of human history, that between the little town of 
Boston on the one hand, and George III, with all the power 
of England at his back, on the other. 

Massachusetts was unquestionably the leader in the Revo- 
lution. " The ring-leading colony," Lord Camden called it 
at the time. Says the latest English writer : " The spirit 
driving the colonies to separation from England, a principle 
attracting and conglobing them into a new union among 
themselves, — how early did this spirit show itself in the New 
England colonies? It was not present in all the colonies. 
It was not present in Virginia ; but when the colonial discon- 
tents burst into a flame, then was the moment when Virginia 
went over to New England, and the spirit of the Pilgrim 
Fathers found the power to turn the offended colonists into a 
new nation." 1 Leckv too declares: 2 " The Central and 



1 Professor J. R. Seeley : "The Expansion of England," pp. 154-155. 

2 Hist, of XVIIIth Century, III, p. 386. 



20 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [222 

Southern colonies long hesitated to follow New England. 
Massachusetts had thrown herself with fierce energy into the 
conflict and soon drew the other provinces in her wake." 
After the first year of war, indeed, the soil of New England, 
as compared with the Centre and South, suffered little from 
the scourge of hostile military occupation. Her sacrifices 
however did not cease. There is no way of determining how 
many New England militia took the field during the strife ; 
the multitude was certainly vast. The figures, however, as 
regards the more regular levies have been preserved and are 
significant. 1 With a population comprising scarcely more 
than one-third of the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies, 
New England furnished 118,251 of the 231,791 Continental 
troops that figured in the war. Massachusetts alone fur- 
nished 67,907, more than one-quarter of the entire number. 
There resistance to British encroachment began; from thence 
disaffection to Britain was spread abroad. As Massachusetts 
led the thirteen colonies, the town of Boston led Massachu- 
setts. 2 The ministers of George III recognized this leader- 
ship and attacked Boston first. So thoroughly did the forces 
of revolt centre here that the English pamphleteers, seeking 
to uphold the government-cause, speak sometimes not so 
much of Americans, or New Englanclers, or, indeed, men of 
Massachusetts, as of Bostonians, as if it were with the people 
of that one little town that the fight was to be waged. Bos- 
ton led the thirteen colonies. Who led the town of Boston ? 
He certainly ought to be a memorable figure in the struggle. 
At the date of the Stamp Act, 1765, the population of 
Boston was not far from 18,000, in vast majority of English 
blood ; though a few families of Huguenots, like the Fan- 
euils, the Bowdoins, the Reveres, and the Molineux, had 



1 Hildreth, III, 441. 

2 "This province began it — I might say this town [Boston] — for here the 
arch-rebels formed their scheme long ago." Gen. Gage to Lord Dart- 
mouth, quoted in Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson, p. 16. 



223] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 21 

strengthened the stock by being crossed with it, and there 
was now and then a Scotchman or an Irishman. As the 
Bostonians were of one race, so in vast majority they were of 
one faith, Independents of Cromwell's type, though there 
were Episcopalians, and a few Quakers and Baptists. The 
town drew its life from the sea, to which all its industry was 
more or less closely related. Hundreds of men were afloat 
much of the time, captains or before the mast, leaving their 
wives and children in the town, but themselves on shore only 
at intervals, from the most enterprising voyages. Of the 
landsmen, a large proportion were ship-builders. The 
staunchest crafts that sailed slid by the dozen down the ways 
of the Boston yards. New England needed a great fleet, hav- 
ing as she did a good part of the carrying-trade of the 
thirteen colonies, with that of the West Indies also. Another 
industry less salutary was the distilling of rum ; and much 
of this went in the ships of Boston and Newport men to the 
coast of Africa, to be exchanged for slaves. It was a different 
world from ours, and should be judged by different standards. 
Besides the branches mentioned, there was little manufac- 
turing in town or country ; the policy of the mother-country 
was to discourage colonial manufactures ; everything must be 
made in England, the colonies being chiefly valuable from the 
selfish consideration that they could be made to afford a profit- 
able market for the goods. In the interior, therefore, the 
people were all farmers, bringing their produce to Boston, and 
taking thence when they went home such English goods as 
they needed. Hence the town was a great mart. The mer- 
chants were numerous and rich ; the distilleries fumed ; the 
shipyards rattled ; the busy ships went in and out, and the 
country people flocked in to the centre. 

Though Boston lost before the Revolution the distinction 
of being the largest town in America, it remained the intel- 
lectual head of the country. Its common-schools gave every 
child a good education, and Harvard College, scarcely out of 
sight, and practically a Boston institution, gave a training 



22 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [224 

hardly inferior to that of the European universities of the 
day. At the bottom of the social scale were the negro slaves. 
The newspapers have many advertisements of slaves for sale, 
and of runaways sought by their masters. Slavery, however, 
was far on the wane, and soon after the Revolution became 
extinguished. The negroes were for the most part servants in 
families, not workmen at trades, and so exercised little influence 
in the way of bringing labor into disrepute. 

As the slaves were at the bottom, so at the top of society 
were the ministers, men often of fine force, ability, and edu- 
cation. No other such career as the ministry afforded was 
open in those days to ambitious men. Year by year the best 
men of each Cambridge class went into the ministry, and the 
best of them were sifted out for the Boston pulpit. Jonathan 
Mayhew, Andrew Eliot, Samuel Cooper, Charles Chauncey, 
Mather Byles, — all were characters of mark, true to the 
Puritan standards, generally, as regards faith, eloquent in 
their office, friends and advisers of the political leaders, them- 
selves often political leaders, foremost in the public meetings, 
and active in private. Usually these ministers were grave 
men, the traditions of the Province imposing upon them a 
severity of deportment which would seem to us harsh; but 
they had a genial side which ought not to be overlooked. 
" Don't you recollect," writes John Adams to his wife, recall- 
ing a reminiscence of a small-pox scare, 1 "Dr. Byles' benedic- 
tion to me when I was inoculated? I lay lolling on my bed 
with half a dozen young fellows as lazy as myself, all wait- 
ing and wishing for symptoms and eruptions, when all of a 
sudden appeared at the door the reverend Doctor with his 
rosy face, many-curled wig, and pontifical air and gait. Says 
he : ' The clergy of this town ought, upon this occasion, to 
adopt the benediction of the Romish clergy, and when we 
enter the apartment of the sick, to say in the foreign pro- 
nunciation, " Pax tecum ! " ' These words are spoken by for- 



1 Philadelphia, Aug. 25, 1776. Adams told this same story to young 
Josiah Quincy in 1821. "Figures of the Past," p. 70. 



225] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 23 

eigners as the doctor pronounced them, Pox take 'em ! " It 
is a pleasant tradition, too, that has been handed down of 
this merry old Tory, that when he was put under guard by 
the patriots, finding that the sentinel, a simple bumpkin, 
wished to go away, Dr. Byles kindly offered to pace the 
beat for him; whereupon the soldier gave up musket and 
accoutrements, and the doctor tramped back and forth Avith 
his piece at the shoulder, serenely nodding to Whig and 
Tory, as he kept guard over himself. Nor is Dr. Byles the 
hero of all the good stories that have come down of the revo- 
lutionary parsons. 

"Scip," said Dr. Chauncey to his old negro, turning 
testily from the writing of a sermon, " What do you want ? " 
" Want a new coat, Massa." " Well, ask Mrs. Chauncey to 
give you an old one of mine." "Nebber do in de world, 
Massa, for old Scip to wear a black coat. If I go walking 
on de Neck Saturday, Dr. Cooper ask me to preach for him, 
sure." The doctor burst into a laugh, told Scip he might 
have a coat of all the colors of the rainbow, and went 
straight out, with cocked hat and gold-headed cane,*to tell the 
joke at the expense of his neighbor, who had the reputation 
of being rather indiscriminate in his invitations. 1 

• Together with the ministers, the merchants were a class of 
influence. Nothing could be bolder than the spirit in those 
days of Boston commerce. In ships built at the yards of the 
town, the Yankee crews went everywhere through the world. 
Timber, tobacco, tar, rice, from the Southern colonies, wheat 
from Maryland, sugar and molasses from the West Indies, 
sought the markets of the world in New England craft. 
The laws of trade were complicated and oppressive; but 
every skipper was more or less a smuggler, and knew well 
how to brave or evade authority. Wealth flowed fast into 
the pockets of the Boston merchants, who built and fur- 
nished fine mansions, walked King Street in gold lace and 

1 Tudor' s Life of Otis, p. 449. 



24 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [226 

fine ruffles, or sat at home, as John Hancock is described, in 
" a red velvet cap, within which was one of fine linen, the 
edge of this turned up over the velvet one two or three 
inches. He wore a blue damask gown lined with silk, a 
white plaited stock, a white silk embroidered waistcoat, black 
silk small-clothes, white silk stockings, and red morocco 
slippers." It is all still made real to us in the superb por- 
traits of Copley, — the merchants sitting in their carved 
chairs, while a chart of distant seas unrolled on the table, or 
a glimpse through a richly curtained window at the back, at 
a busy wharf or a craft under full sail, hints at the employ- 
ment that has lifted the men to wealth and consequence. 

Below the merchants, the class of workmen formed a body 
most energetic. Dealing with the tough oak that was to be 
shaped into storm-defying hulls, twisting the cordage that 
must stand the strain of arctic ice and tropic hurricane, forg- 
ing anchors that must hold off the lee-shores of all tempes- 
tuous seas, — this was work to bring out vigor of muscle, and 
also of mind and temper. The caulkers were bold politicians, 
and have given perhaps to political nomenclature one of the best 
known terms. The rope-walk hands were energetic to turbu- 
lence, courting the brawls with the soldiers which led to the 
Boston massacre. It must be said, too, that the taverns throve. 
New England rum was very plentiful, the cargo of many a 
ship that passed the "Outer Light," of many a townsman 
and high private who came to harsh words and, perhaps, 
fisticuffs in Pudding Lane or Dock Square. The prevailing 
tone of the town, however, was decent and grave. The 
churches were thronged on Sundays and at Thursday lecture 
as they have not been since. All classes were readers ; the 
book-sellers fill whole columns in the newspapers with their 
lists ; there are books on sale and in the circulating libraries, 
the best then being in all departments of literature. The 
five newspapers the people may be said to have edited them- 
selves. Instead of the impersonal articles of a modern jour- 
nal, the space in a sheet of the Revolution, after the news 



227] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 25 

and advertisements, was occupied by letters, in which "A 
Chatterer," "A. Z.," or more often some classic character, 
"Sagittarius," "Vindex," " Philanthrop," " Valerius Pop- 
licola," " Nov-Anglus," or " Massachusettensis," belabors 
Whig or Tory, according to his own stripe of politics, — the 
champion sometimes appearing in a rather Chinese fashion, 
stilted up on high rhetorical soles, and padded out with 
pompous period and excessive classic allusion, but often terse, 
bold, and well-armed from the arsenals of the best political 
thinkers. 

Of course the Folk-mote of such a town as this would have 
spirit and interest. Wrote a Tory in those days : l " The 
town-meeting at Boston is the hot-bed of sedition. It is 
there that all their dangerous insurrections are engendered ; 
it is there that the flame of discord and rebellion was first 
lighted up and disseminated over the provinces ; it is there- 
fore greatly to be wished that Parliament may rescue the 
loyal inhabitants of that town and province from the merci- 
less hand of an ignorant mob, led on and inflamed by self- 
interested and profligate men." Have more interesting assem- 
blies ever taken place in the history of the world than the 
Boston town-meetings ? Out of them grew the independence 
of the United States, and what more important event has ever 
occurred ? 

The great administration of Pitt had come to an end. 
France was, and deserved to be, at his feet in disgrace. Canada 
was lost to the fleur-de-lis ; the iron cross from the market- 
place of Louisburg had come as a trophy to New England, 
to this day, above the door of the Harvard library, the evi- 
dence of the good service the provincials had done. They 
had aided well the great minister, and the young general who 
went down in the death-grapple with Montcalm. England 
was loaded with glory, but also with debt. " No more than 

1 " Sagittarius," quoted by Frothingham : "Sam. Adams' Eegiments," 
Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1863. 



26 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [228 

fair," said the ministers, and with justice, "that the colonists, 
who derive much advantage from this, should help pay the 
debt." So Parliament, with little thought, passed the Stamp 
Act, that every document of a nature at all formal, every 
deed, receipt, commission, should have on the corner a certain 
stamp, to be bought for a few pence of the government. In 
all probability the colonies could have been brought to pay 
handsomely, if they had been left to their own free action. 
The vote in Parliament was taken late at night; the benches 
were thin; the few members present yawning for bed, glad 
to dispose of the small affair and finish the session, no one 
apparently aware that the act was critical. It has been called 
one of the most momentous legislative acts that ever took place. 
James Otis was the man who, now that Parliament forgot, 
stood up to remind it of an old privilege of Englishmen. 
"No taxation without representation," he said. "America 
has no representative in Parliament; you cannot legally tax 
us without our consent." That became presently the cry 
throughout the thirteen colonies ; and, in the mother-country 
itself, no smaller men than the magnificent Pitt, Lord Cam- 
den, the first of English lawyers, and Barre, the comrade of 
Wolfe, said that the colonists were quite right. But the king, 
the ministers, and a majority of Parliament declared that all 
antiquated and superseded. "Leeds, Birmingham, Man- 
chester, three-fourths of England, indeed, had no represen- 
tatives in Parliament, yet they were taxed. How forth- 
putting for that inferior class of people, our colonists, to set 
up a cry over a state of things with which Englishmen were 
satisfied ! If there was no formal representation, they were 
virtually represented." " There is no such thing," said the 
Boston leaders, "as virtual representation. If Leeds, Bir- 
mingham, Manchester, and other great cities are not repre- 
sented, they ought to be. Either let us send representatives 
to Parliament, or let our Assemblies tax us." "I rejoice that 
America has resisted," thundered the wonderful Pitt. "Six 
millions of freemen so dead to all feelings of liberty as volun- 



229] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 27 

tarily to submit to be slaves, would be fit instruments to make 
slaves of the rest." As he spoke America took courage to do 
what otherwise she would scarcely have ventured upon. The 
voice of the most powerful of subjects shook all England also. 
The king, however, was the very type of set purpose ; the 
House of Lords stood at his side almost to a man ; in the 
Commons, the servile, corrupt majority were the "king's 
friends ; " so that although the Stamp Act, for expediency's 
sake, was repealed, Parliament accompanied the repeal with a 
Declaratory Act, that it was competent to legislate for the 
colonies in all cases whatsoever. 

When this determination was announced, James Otis, who, 
from leader in Boston town-meetings, had become conspicuous 
in the Assembly, thought it right to yield.. It is wrong, he 
said, the ground taken by the Declaratory Act, but we must 
submit to what Parliament ordains; but others were coming 
to the front of clearer views and stronger determination. 
Presently from the Massachusetts Assembly came a statement 
of what were felt to be the colonial rights, in which the old 
claim, "No taxation without representation," was reasserted, 
and a step or two taken in advance of that position. It was, 
indeed, hinted, and not obscurely, that the claim of Parlia- 
ment to a right to legislate for the colonies was wrong in 
other respects besides matters of taxation ; that each colony, 
while owing allegiance to the King, like all parts of the 
British empire, had yet, in its General Court, a parliament of 
its own, and that the Lords and Commons at Westminster 
were utterly without jurisdiction beyond the sea. Presently 
after this the Massachusetts Assembly caused to be prepared 
a " Circular Letter," to be sent to the legislatures of the other 
colonies, in which the ground taken was explained, with the 
reasons for it, and an invitation conveyed to each colony in 
turn, to state in reply what seemed to it reasonable in the 
matter. In England, Parliament promptly condemned the 
course of Massachusetts, demanding that the Assembly should 
rescind the "Circular Letter," a demand which the Assembly 



28 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [230 

met at once by a refusal, the vote standing 92 to 17. Parlia- 
ment, carrying out the principles of the Declaratory Act, laid 
taxes upon glass, paper, paints, and tea ; that the collection 
might certainly be enforced, and the rising spirit of discontent 
in Boston be effectually checked, ships of war were stationed 
in the harbor, and the 14th and 29th regiments established in 
the town. 

The discontent was by no means confined to Massachusetts. 
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, closely 
dependent, took their tone from her. In New York was a 
party prepared to go all lengths with the most strenuous, step 
for step ; there was a party, too, better placed as regards 
wealth and position, the rich merchants, the Episcopalians 
generally, the holders of the great feudal estates, the Dutch 
farmers and recent German settlers, who were either actively 
loyal to the crown or quite apathetic. In Pennsylvania, 
there were strong opposers of the English policy, whose lead- 
ing representative, now that Franklin was absent in England, 
was John Dickinson, very famous through the " Farmer's 
Letters," well reasoned papers in which was given a popular 
explanation of the unconstitutionality of government acts; 
the powerful sect of Quakers, however, as the trouble deep- 
ened, set themselves against resistance to the powers that were, 
and the Germans felt little interest. Passing to the South, 
Virginia was all alive. The aristocracy of great tobacco- 
planters, who held the power, full of vigor and trained to 
struggle in the long-continued disputes with different royal 
governors, stood most stubbornly against British encroach- 
ment. The colony was far enough from democracy ; the large 
class of poor landless Avhites had scarcely more interest in 
politics than the slaves ; but the House of Burgesses under- 
stood well the championship of American privileges, and was 
prepared to second, even once or twice to anticipate, Massa- 
chusetts in measures of opposition. Influenced in the early 
day by Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Dabney Carr, 
it was sometimes in advance of the northern province, and a 



231] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 29 

little later, when Washington, Jefferson, and Madison camel 
forward, it stood certainly foremost. In South Carolina, too, 
was a party headed by Christopher Gadsden, prepared to take 
the most advanced ground. 

In the preliminary years, however, Massachusetts was very 
plainly before all others, according to the view both of 
America and England. If sometimes another province was < 
in advance in taking a bold step, it was perhaps due to the 
management of the skilful Massachusetts statesmen, who, for i 
reasons of policy, held in check their own Assembly, that 
local pride elsewhere might be conciliated, and America, 
generally, be brought to present an unbroken front. 



"Sam Adams." 

It is time now to take a look at the Massachusetts leaders, 
Boston men with two or three exceptions. On the govern- 
ment side, the foremost champions in these preliminary years 
were the two royal governors, Francis Bernard, and his suc- 
cessor Thomas Hutchinson. These men have had hard 
measure in history. In the heat of the battle the patriots 
could see nothing good in them ; the cause they fought for 
was lost; their enemies having triumphed, handed their 
names down to obloquy, and few have cared to attempt any 
vindication. Avoiding all eulogy, it is only just to say as to 
Bernard, that he was a man respectable in ability and character, 
who, with fair motives enough, upheld the royal side honestly 
and energetically against the great majority of the Province. 
He was an English gentleman, with an Oxford education. His 
tastes and accomplishments were scholarly ; his political ideas 
were those universally held by the class to which he belonged. 
Lord Camden said of Bernard in a discussion with Lord 
Mansfield : " This great, good, and sensible man, of all the 
governors on the continent, had pointed out the inconven- 
ience of the Stamp Act." He was always opposed to it and 



30 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [232 

strongly urged its repeal. 1 Botta, too, paints his character in 
glowing terms'. 2 

Hutchinson, also, at the outset of the difficulties, occupied 
liberal ground. 3 His case in particular at this late day may 
be kindly considered. He came to the leadership upon 
Bernard's retirement in 1769. Puritan in faith and in the 
decorum of his life, he was for many years the best known 
and most honored son of Massachusetts. He prepared a his- 
tory of the Province which has still the highest authority. 
Coming young into public life, he won at once extraordinary 
confidence. He was early in the Assembly and soon its 
speaker. He went quickly into the council or upper house 
of the legislature, became agent of the colony in Eng- 
land, judge of probate, chief-justice, lieutenant-governor, and 
governor. Much of the time he held several important 
offices at once. In private life his character was blameless ; 
in public life, his course found thorough approval until the 
date of the Stamp Act. It was easy enough in those days 
for a man to take the government rather than the popular 
side. The lengths to which the patriot leaders presently went 
seemed to Hutchinson improper and disastrous, and as the 
controversy grew bitter, he was forced into positions which, 
probably, he would not have taken in a calmer time. Gener- 
ally, in his championship of the Tory cause, he showed a 
courage, ability, and persistency quite admirable. He hoped, 
no doubt, for advancement for himself and his sons, stood in 
some awe, natural enough in a colonist, before the king and 
English nobles, came to feel personal hatred for the men who 
opposed him, so that he could no more do them justice than 
they him. These were human limitations; his battle had 
much manfulness. When afterwards he went to England, 
and after a few homesick years died at last a forlorn exile, 



brake's Boston, p. 723. 

2 Botta, Hist, of War of Independ., I, 112. 

3 Manuscript letter, Nov. 13, 1773, Mass. Archives. 



233] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 31 

mortified and disappointed, he left in America the reputa- 
tion of having been the evil genius of his country. A can- 
did student, brushing aside prejudices, is forced to regard 
Hutchinson as one of the most unfortunate characters of our 
history, and feel that there is much pathos in his story. 1 

We must now bring upon our stage quite a different 
figure. The splendid Otis, whose leadership was at first 
unquestioned, who had only to enter Boston town-meeting to 
call forth shouts and clapping of hands, and who had equal 
authority in the Assembly, as early as 1770, was fast sinking 
into insanity. In spite of fits of unreasonable violence and 
absurd folly, vacillations between extremes of subserviency 
and audacious resistance, his influence with the people long 
remained. He was like the huge cannon on the man-of-war, 
in Victor Hugo's story, that had broken from its moorings 
in the storm, and become a terror to those whom it formerly 
defended. He was indeed a great gun, from whom in the 
time of the Stamp Act had been sent the most powerful bolts 
against unconstitutional oppression. With lashings parted, 
however, as the storm grew violent, he plunged dangerously 
from side to side, almost sinking the ship, all the more an 
object of dread from the calibre that had once made him so 
serviceable. It was a melancholy sight, and yet a great 
relief, when his friends saw him at last bound hand and foot, 
and carried into retirement. 

But New England had been prolific of children fitted for 
the time. There were John Scollay, Benjamin Kent, Wil- 
liam Molineux, William Phillips, John Pitts, Paul Eevere, 
— plain citizens, merchants, mechanics, selectmen of the town, 



l As this monograph is in press, appears "The Diary and Letters of 
Thomas Hutchinson," a selection from his unpublished manuscripts, edited 
by his great-grandson. The book is full of interesting materials, and will 
cause a new estimate to be put upon the character and career of the unfor- 
tunate governor. We are, perhaps, in danger of running to the other 
extreme. See "Governor Thomas Hutchinson," by George E. Ellis, in 
Atlantic, for May, 1884. 



32 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [234 

deacons in the churches, cool heads, well-to-do, persistent, cour- 
ageous, sturdy wheel-horses for the occasion. Of a higher order 
were the wise and faithful James Bowdoin, the able Joseph 
Hawley of Northampton, young men like John Hancock, 
Josiah Quincy, Joseph Warren, John Adams, men of wealth 
or spirited ability, who had, like Otis, some of them, a gift 
of eloquence to set hearts on fire, some of them executive 
power, some of them cunning to lay trains and supply the 
flash in proper time. It was a wonderful group. But Bow- 
doin was sometimes inert ; Hawley was unreliable through a 
strange moodiness ; Hancock hampered by foibles that some- 
times quite cancelled his merits; Quincy, who died when 
scarcely past his youth, like a youth was sometimes fickle, 
ready to temporize when to falter was destruction ; again in 
unwise fervor counselling assassination as a proper expedient. 
Warren, too, could rush into extremes of ferocity, wishing he 
might wade to the knees in blood ; while John Adams showed 
only an intermittent zeal in the public cause until all the 
preliminary work was done. 

There was need of a man in this group, of sufficient 
ascendency through intellect and character to win deference 
from all — wise enough to see always the supreme end, what 
each instrument was fit for, and to bring all forces to bear in 
the right way — a man of consummate tact, to sail in torpedo- 
sown waters without an explosion, though conducting wires 
of local prejudice, class-sensitiveness, and personal foible on 
every hand, led straight down to magazines of wrath which 
might shatter the cause in a moment, — a man of resources of 
his own to such an extent that he could supplement from him- 
self what was wanting in others, always awake though others 
might want to sleep, — always at work though others might be 
tired, — a man devoted, without thought of personal gain or 
fame, simply and solely to the public cause. Such a man 
there was, and his name was Samuel Adams. His early 
career had not been promising. In private affairs he had 
quite failed of success, winning nothing for himself, and los- 



235] Samuel Adams , the Man of the Town-Meeting. 33 

ing the patrimony that had descended to him. In public 
affairs he had been for nine years a tax-collector, had failed 
to obtain the money, was largely in arrears, and had been in 
danger of prosecution. The town, however, knew that " Sam 
Adams' " deficiency was owing to hard times largely, which 
made the people slow of payment ; if he had failed to press us 
as he might have done it was partly due to his humanity, 
partly to his absorption in other directions. He was a ruling 
spirit in the clubs and in town-meeting, a constant writer of 
political articles for the newspapers, a deep student of all 
books relating to the science of government. It was early 
known that when public documents requiring special care 
were needed in town or Assembly, " Sam Adams " had a fund 
of facts and ideas, and a knack of putting things, that made 
his help valuable. His poverty and reputation for business 
incapacity kept him back so that while much younger men 
became distinguished, it was not until he was forty-two that 
he came forward prominently. Then, in the year 1764, he 
was appointed by Boston town-meeting to prepare instructions 
for their newly-elected representatives. The year following 
Samuel Adams began, as a member of the Assembly, a career 
of public service almost uninterrupted, until in late old age 
his faculties became broken. 

In character and career he was a singular combination of 
things incongruous. He was in religion the narrowest of 
Puritans, but in manner very genial. He was perfectly 
rigid in his opinions, but in his expression of them often 
very compliant. He was the most conservative of men, 
but was regarded as were the " abolition fanatics," in our 
time, before the emancipation proclamation. His upright- 
ness was inflexible, yet a wilier fox than he in all matters 
of political maneuvering, our history does not show. He 
had in business no push or foresight, but in politics was a 
wonder of force and shrewdness. He expressed opinions, 
whose audacity would have brought him at once to the halter 
if he could have been seized, in a voice full of trembling. 
3 



t/ 



34 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [236 

Even in his young manhood, his hair had become grey and 
his hand shook as if with paralysis ; but he lived to his eighty- 
second year, his work rarely interrupted by sickness, serving 
as governor of Massachusetts for several successive terms after 
he had passed his three score and ten, almost the last survivor 
among the great pre-r evolutionary figures. 

Bancroft has spoken of Samuel Adams as more than any 
other man, "the type and representative of the New England 
town-meeting." 1 Boston, as we have seen, is the largest 
community that ever maintained the town organization, 
probably the most generally able and intelligent. No other 
town ever played so conspicuous a part in connection with 
important events. It led Massachusetts, New England, the 
thirteen colonies, in the struggle for independence. Probably 
in the whole history of the Anglo-Saxon race, there has been 
no other so interesting manifestation of the activity of the 
Folk-mote. Of this town of towns, Samuel Adams was the 
son of sons. He was strangely identified with it always. 
He was trained in Boston schools and Harvard College. He 
never left the town except on the town's errands or those 
of the province of which it was the head. He had no private 
business after the first years of his manhood, was the public 
servant simply and solely in places large and small, — fire- 
ward, committee to see that chimneys were safe, tax-collector, 
moderator of town-meeting, representative, congressman, gover- 
nor. One may almost call him the creature of the town- 
meeting. His development took place on the floor of Faneuil 
Hall and the Old South, from the time when he looked on as 
a wondering boy to the time when he stood there as the 
master figure ; and such a master of the methods by which a 
town-meeting may be swayed, the world has never seen. On 
the best of terms with the people, — the workmen of the ship- 
yards, the distillers (he had himself tried to be a brewer), the 
merchants — he knew always precisely what springs to touch. 

1 In a private conversation with the writer ; also Hist, of Const., II., 260. 



237] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Tovm-Meeting. 35 

He was the prince of canvassers, the very king of the caucus, 
of which his father was the inventor. He was not a great 
orator. Always clear-headed in the most confusing turmoil, 
he had ever at command a simple, convincing style of speech 
effective with plain men ; and when a fire burned for which 
he could not trust himself, he could rely on the magnificent 
speech of Otis, or Quincy, or Warren, who poured their copious 
words, often quite unconscious that cunning " Sam Adams " 
really managed his men and was directing the stream. His 
ascendency was quite extraordinary and no less marked over 
men of ability than over ordinary minds. " Master of the . 
Puppets," is one of the many expressions applied to him by 
Hutchinson to denote the completeness of his leadership. 1 As 
often Samuel Adams' followers did not know that they were 
being led, so, possibly, he failed himself to see, sometimes, 
that he was leading, believing himself to be the mere agent 
of the will of the great people which decided this way or that. 
At any rate, for the democracy of the town-meeting he never 
had any feeling but reverence. So far as his New Englanders 
were concerned " Vox populi " was always with him " Vox 
Dei." His first conspicuous act was to serve as a channel to 
that voice in 1764, instructing in behalf of the town the 
representatives ; to that voice he was always ready himself to 
defer. In his old age, when he was hesitating whether or no 
to approve the Federal Constitution which he thought might 
remove, to a dangerous degree, the power from the people to 
a central authority, shrewd men knew how to manage the 
manager. A meeting of Boston mechanics was contrived, 
which endorsed the constitution ; the result was made known 
to Samuel Adams by a committee of plain men with Paul 
Revere at their head, after which he hesitated no longer. 
While many of the best men of New England, after the 
peace, became Federalists, favoring sometimes the establish- 
ment of a monarchy and an order of nobility, Samuel Adams 

1 From manuscript letter, July 10, '73, in Mass. Archives. 



36 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [238 

stood sturdily for a democracy, perhaps too decentralized. He 
carried to an extreme his dislike of delegated power. When, 
in 1784, Boston, grown unwieldy, agitated the question of 
establishing a city-government, the people, instead of trans- 
acting their own affairs, committing them to the management 
of a mayor and representative councilmen, Samuel Adams, 
chairman of the town's committee to report on the defects of 
the town organization, reported that " there were no defects," 1 
and in his time there was no change. 

We are accustomed to call Washington the " Father of his 
Country." It would be useless to dispute his right to the 
title ; he and no other will bear it through all the ages. He 
established our country's freedom with the sword, then 
guided its course during the first critical years of its inde- 
pendent existence. JSTo one can know the figure without feel- 
ing how real is its greatness. It is impossible to see how 
without Washington the nation could have ever been. But 
after all, is "Father of America" the best title for Washing- 
ton ? Where and what was Washington during those long 
preliminary years when the nation was shaping as the bones 
do grow in the womb of her that is with child? A quiet 
planter, who in youth as a surveyor had come to know the 
woods, who in his young manhood had led bodies of pro- 
vincials with some efficiency in certain unsuccessful military 
expeditions, who in maturity had sat, for the most part in 
silence, among his active colleagues in the House of Bur- 
gesses, with scarcely a suggestion to make in all the sharp 
debate while the new nation was shaping. There is another 
character in our history to whom was once given the title 
" Father of America " — a man to a large extent forgotten, 
his reputation overlaid by those who followed him, — no 
other than this man of the Town-meeting, Samuel Adams. 
As far as the genesis of America is concerned, Samuel Adams 
can more properly be called the " Father of our Country " 

1 Boston Town Eecords, Nov. 9, 1785. 



239] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 37 

than Washington. He is, at any rate, second only to Wash- 
ington in the story of the Revolution. 1 

Those instructions to the Boston representatives in 1764, 
in which Samuel Adams spoke for the town, emerging then, 
at the age of forty-two, into the public life where he remained 
to the end, contain the first suggestion ever made in America 
for a meeting of the colonies, looking toward a resistance to 
British encroachments. From that paper came the " Stamp 
Act Congress. " In the years which immediately followed, 
being at length in the Assembly, he soon rose to the leading 
position, superseding James Otis, who gradually sank under 
mental disease. While the cotemporaries of Samuel Adams 
rejoiced over the repeal of the Stamp Act, he saw in the dec- 
laration of Parliament by which it was accompanied, that it 
was competent to legislate for the colonies in all cases what- 
soever, plain evidence that more trouble was in store, and 
was the most influential among the few who strove to pre- 
vent a disastrous supineness among the people. From this 
time forward the substantial authorship of almost every state 
paper of importance in Massachusetts can be traced to him. 
Very noticeably, he was the author of the " Circular Letter " 
in 1768, 2 by which the colonies in general were roused, and 
the way for union prepared. From that year on, he saw no 
satisfactory issue from the dispute but in the independence of 
America, and began to labor for it with all his energy. It 
had been a dream with many, indeed, that some time there 
was to be a great independent empire in this western world; 
but no public man saw so soon as Samuel Adams, that in the 
latter half of the eighteenth century the time for it had come, 



1 "A man whom Plutarch, if he had only lived late enough, would have 
delighted to include in his gallery of worthies, a man who in the history 
of the American Revolution is second only to Washington, Samuel Adams." 
— John Fiske : (taken from his forthcoming "History of the American 
People" by kind permission of the author). 

2 Satisfactorily established in Wells' Life of S. Adams, I., 172. 



38 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [240 

and that to work for it was the duty of all patriots. 1 One 
might pass in review the great figures of our revolutionary 
epoch, one by one, and show that then, seven years before 
the declaration of independence, there was not a man except 
Samuel Adams, who looked forward to it and worked for it. 
The world generally had not conceived of the attainment of 

I independence as a present possibility. Those who came to 
think it possible, like Franklin, Dickinson of Pennsylvania, 
and James Otis, shrunk from the idea as involving calamity, 

I and only tried to secure a better regulated dependence. As 
late as 1775, the idea of separation, according to Jefferson, 
had " never yet entered into any person's mind." 2 It was 
well-known, however, in Massachusetts what were the opin- 
ions of Samuel Adams. He was isolated even in the group 
that most closely surrounded him. Even so trusty a fol- 
lower and attached a friend as Joseph Warren could not 
stand with him here. What Garrison was to the abolition 
of slavery, was Samuel Adams to independence, — a man 
looked on with the greatest dread as an extremist and fanatic 
by many of those who afterwards fought for freedom, down 
almost to that very day, July 4th, 1776, when largely 
through his skilful and tireless management, as he worked 



1 July 1st, 1774, Hutchinson, having just reached London, was hurried 
by Lord Dartmouth into the presence of the king without being allowed 
time to change his clothes after the voyage. A conversation of two hours 
took place, the king showing the utmost eagerness to find out the truth as 
to America. While answering the king's inquiries concerning the popular 
leaders, Hutchinson remarked that Samuel Adams was regarded " as the 
opposer of Government and a sort of Wilkes in New England. 

"King : What gives him his importance ? 

"Hutchinson: A great pretended zeal for liberty and a most inflexible 
natural temper. He was the first that publicly asserted the independency 
of the colonies upon the kingdom." Diary and Letters of Thos. Hutch- 
inson, p. 167. 

The testimony of Hutchinson is often referred to, because, as a man of 
judgment, himself in the thick of the fight, and in relations of bitter hos- 
tility to Samuel Adams, his evidence as to Samuel Adams' importance has 
a special value. 



241] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 39 

the wires in his subtle way, the Congress which he had had 
so large an influence in bringing into being, came at last to 
stand upon his ground. 

In public documents which he drafted, indeed, he dis- 
tinctly and repeatedly disclaimed all thought of a severance, 
and was loudly charged by Hutchinson and others with 
shameful duplicity, since his private utterances were often of 
a different tenor. If he had cared to defend his consistency, 
he would have declared, no doubt, that when he was acting 
simply as the mouth-piece of a body, few or none of whom 
had reached his position, he must use other language than 
when speaking for himself. Such a defence is not alto- 
gether satisfactory. It is a still harder task to justify the 
conduct of the group of which he was the controlling 
mind, in the matter of the famous letters which were 
sent from England to America, by Franklin, then the Mas- 
sachusetts agent, in 1773. The letters were private, written 
by men in high position in the Province to English friends, 
and were obtained by Franklin in a way only recently 
explained. 1 They were sent to America on the express con- 
dition that no copies were to be made ; this, however, was 
evaded by the leaders, who finally published them broad- 
cast, but not until the public mind had been prepared in a 
way which was certainly marvellously artful. The letters of 
Hutchinson in the collection are mild enough in their temper, 
and certainly not out of harmony with his well-known views. 
They were made, however, to produce against him the 
strongest possible resentment. Aggravated horror over their 
contents was expressed before their publication, to affect the 
public view. Some sentences were falsely construed, others 
garbled and disjointed. Hutchinson declares his letters are 
the most innocent things in the world, " but if it had been 
' Chevy Chace/ the leaders are so adroit they would have 
made the people believe it was full of evil and treason." 2 



1 See Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, Feb. and March, 1878. 

2 Manuscript letter in Mass. Archives, July 10, 1773. 



40 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [242 

Samuel Adams' complicity in the affair is quite certain, and it 
is hard to reconcile the thing with any principle of fair deal- 
ing. The whole transaction has' a questionable color, and 
though patriotic historians and biographers have been able to 
see nothing in it, except, so to speak, a dove-like iridescence, 
an unprejudiced judge will detect the scaly gleam of a crea- 
ture in better repute for wisdom than for harmlessness. The 
fact was, Hutchinson and Samuel Adams were such thor- 
oughly good haters of one another that Dr. Johnson might 
have folded them both to his burly breast in an ecstasy. B7 
some casuistry or other, the Puritan politician, upright though 
he was, made crooked treatment of his Tory bUe noir square 
with his sense of right. He would fight the devil with fire, 
rather than run any risks. 

" His chief dependence/' wrote Hutchinson, " is upon Boston 
town-meeting, where he originates the measures which are 
followed by the rest of the towns, and, of course, are adopted 
or justified by the Assembly." It will be interesting to look 
at two or three of these town -meetings, illustrating, as they 
do so clearly, the methods and character of the man. The first 
days of March, 1770, are very memorable in the history of 
the Town-meeting. The snow in King street lay stained 
with the blood of Boston people, shed by soldiers of the 29th 
regiment. " The troops must go ! " said the town. " They 
shall stay ! " said King George, through his deputies, and the 
question, was, which side should yield. Hutchinson, chief- 
magistrate, had shown the best nerve and judgment at the 
time of the ' Massacre/ by calm words from the east balcony 
of the Old State House, averting a bloody battle, even when 
the alarm-bells were summoning the frantic citizens, and on 
the other side, the soldiers were kneeling in their ranks ready 
for street firing. Out of the tumult the usual quiet and 
decorum were appearing. The selectmen had drawn up the 
warrant, which the constables of the different wards had 
posted in due form. The Folk-mote, swelling beyond the 
dimensions of Faneuil Hall, had flowed over to the Old 



243] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 41 

South, the path of the crowd thitherward crossing the blood- 
stains where the victims had weltered ; now, in the meeting- 
house and the street outside, they waited sullenly but in order. 

In the council-chamber in the Old State House, Hutchinson, 
surrounded by his twenty-eight councillors and the com- 
manders of the troops and the fleet, the former in wigs and 
scarlet robes of office, the latter in uniform, looked out on the 
crowd as they passed by to the Old South, and recalled the 
way in which, in the preceding century, the town had handled 
Sir Edmund Andros. The imposing portraits of Charles II. 
and James II. from the wall seemed to shed an influence upon 
the company to make them strong in maintaining the royal 
prerogative. 

On the people's side, the central figure, as always in those 
days, is Samuel Adams. Not at all that he is the most con- 
spicuous ; he is neither selectman nor moderator ; he is not 
chairman of the committee which the town appoints to bear 
its message to the lieutenant-governor. As is generally the 
case, others are in the foreground, while matters rest upon 
him. All is in order according to the time-consecrated Anglo- 
Saxon traditions. Samuel Adams has addressed the people 
in his direct, earnest way, and now, as a simple member of 
the committee, behind Hancock, the elegant chairman, he goes 
with the rest to demand of Hutchinson the removal of the 
troops. The crisis has come : now, in the moment of collision, 
the gilded figure-head is taken in out of danger, and "a 
wedge of steel " 1 is thrust out to bear the brunt of the impact. 
As spokesman of the town, Samuel Adams demands the 
removal of the troops. Hutchinson is not a coward. Though 
it is declared that authority to remove the troops rests only with 



1 Excellent John Adams found the legitimate resources of rhetoric quite 
inadequate for the expression of his admiration for his kinsman. " He was," 
he says, " the wedge of steel which split the knot of lignum vitae that tied 
America to England." 



42 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [244 

Gage at New York, the ranking officer, Dalrymple, agrees that 
the 29th regiment shall go down the harbor to the Castle ; 
the 14th, however, must remain. The committee is given to 
understand that this answer must end the matter, and with it 
they return to the town-meeting. They go forth from the 
south door of the Old State House, Samuel Adams the soul 
of the group. Though the March air is keen, he bares his 
head; he is but 48, but his hair is already grey, and a tremor 
of the head and hands helps to give his figure as he walks a 
certain venerableness. "Both regiments or none!" "Both 
regiments or none ! " he is heard to say to the men on this 
side and that, as the crowd in the street press back to make a 
lane by which the committee can pass. When presently, 
before the moderator, the reply of Hutchinson is reported, the 
significance of the words spoken to the crowd appears. " Both 
regiments or none!" from the right; "Both regiments or 
none ! " from the left. The town has caught from the " Chief 
Incendiary " the watch-word ; it is uttered by every voice. 
It is formally voted that both regiments must go, and 
Samuel Adams, with his supporting group, is presently once 
more in the council-chamber to speak the peremptory mes- 
sage. There is hurried consultation, attempt at evasion, a 
plea of powerlessness to execute the popular requirement. 
But focussed in the dark blue eye of Samuel Adams is the 
determination of all the freemen of the Province. The 
responsibility is forced upon the magistrate which he seeks to 
avoid. The promise is wrung from the unwilling lips that 
both regiments shall forthwith go, to be known in history 
henceforth as the " Sam Adams regiments ; " and so, under 
the master's guidance, the whole power of the king, as was 
said at the time in England, was successfully bullied. It is 
rarely enough that one can find any trace of boastfulness in 
the words of Samuel Adams, but writing of the encounter 
with Hutchinson to Warren, in the following year, there is a 
touch of exultation in the words : " If fancy deceived me not, 



245] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 43 



I observed his knees to tremble. I thought I saw his face 
grow pale, and I enjoyed the sight." 1 

Less dramatic, but far more memorable than his manage- 
ment of the expulsion of the regiments, was the banding 
together of the Massachusetts towns through Samuel Adams, 
by means of the " Committees of Correspondence." This 
was his almost unaided work, 2 and no act of his career shows 
to better advantage his far-seeing statesmanship. The most 
clear-sighted of the Tories failed entirely to detect the por- 
tent of the scheme until it was accomplished ; while of the 
patriots, scarcely one of prominence stood by Samuel Adams, 
in bringing the measure to pass, or took part cordially, until 
a late period, in carrying out the plan. Three weeks passed 
before he could procure a town-meeting for the initiation of 
his idea, during which three petitions signed by freeholders 
were presented. On November 2, 1772, at length Samuel 
Adams vanquished the sluggishness of his friends. The 
town-meeting in which the matter came to vote was small ; 
the measure was earnestly debated, not coming to a decision 
until late at night. Characteristically, Samuel Adams took 
for himself a second place on the Committee, giving the 
chairmanship to James Otis, who now in a short interval of 
sanity, rendered his last service to the community of which 
he had been the idol. Samuel Adams was appointed to draft 
a statement of the rights of the colonists " as men, as chris- 
tians, and as subjects ; " Joseph Warren, who was fast rising 
to the position of his ablest and trustiest lieutenant, drew up 
a " List of Grievances ; " and Dr. Benjamin Church, a man 
who began brilliantly and usefully, but made a traitor's end, 
prepared a letter to the towns. Samuel Adams' statement is 
substantially an anticipation of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. 



1 Hutchinson attributes the result to the weakness of Col. Dalrymple. 
" He brought it all upon himself by his offer to remove one of the regi- 
ments." Diary and Letters, p. 80. 

2 Settled satisfactorily in Wells' Life of S. Adams, I., 509. 



44 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [246 

In the last days of 1772, the document, having been 
printed, was transmitted to those for whom it had been 
intended, producing at once an immense effect. The towns 
almost unanimously appointed similar committees ; from every 
quarter came replies in which the sentiments of Samuel 
Adams were echoed. In the library of Bancroft is a volume 
of manuscripts worn and stained by time which have an 
interest scarcely inferior to that possessed by the " Declara- 
tion of Independence" itself, as the fading page hangs 
against its pillar in the library of the State Department at 
Washington. They are the original replies sent by the Mas- 
sachusetts towns to Samuel Adams 7 Committee sitting in 
Faneuil Hall, during those first months of 1773. One may 
well read them with bated breath, for it is the touch of the 
elbow as the stout little democracies dress up into line, just 
before they plunge in at Concord and Bunker-Hill. There 
is sometimes a noble scorn of the restraints of orthography, 
as of the despotism of Great Britain, in the work of the old 
town clerks, for they generally were secretaries of the com- 
mittees ; and once in a while a touch of Dogberry's quaint- 
ness, as the punctilious officials, though not always "putting 
God first," yet take pains that there shall be no mistake as to 
their piety, by making every letter in the name of the Deity 
a rounded capital; yet the documents ought to inspire the 
deepest reverence. It is the highest mark the town-meeting 
has ever touched. Never before and never since have Anglo- 
Saxon men, in lawful Folk-mote assembled, given utterance 
to thoughts and feelings so fine in themselves and so preg- 
nant with great events. To each letter stand affixed the names 
of the committee in autograph. This awkward scrawl was 
made by the rough fist of a Cape Ann fisherman, on shore 
for the day to do at town-meeting the duty his fellows had 
laid upon him ; the hand that wrote this was cramped from 
the scythe-handle, as its possessor mowed an intervale on the 
Connecticut; this blotted signature where smutted fingers 
have left a black stain was written by a blacksmith of Mid- 



247] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 45 

dlesex, turning aside a moment from forging a barrel that 
was to do duty at Lexington. They were men of the plain- 
est ; but as the documents, containing statements of the most 
generous principles and the most courageous determination, 
were read in the town-houses, the committees who produced 
them and the constituents for whom they stood were lifted 
above the ordinary level. Their horizon expanded to the 
broadest ; they had in view not simply themselves, but the 
welfare of the continent ; not solely their own generation but 
remote posterity. It was Samuel Adams 7 own plan, the con- 
sequences of which no one foresaw, neither friend nor foe, but 
in January the eyes of men were opening. One of the ablest 
of the Tories wrote : l " This is the foulest, subtlest, and most 
venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition. I 
saw the small seed when it was implanted ; it was a grain of 
mustard. I have watched the plant until it has become a 
great tree." It was the transformation into a strong cord of 
what had been a rope of sand. 

As to intercolonial committees of correspondence, the ini- 
tiative in their formation was taken soon afterwards by Vir- 
ginia, Dabney Carr making the motion to that effect in the 
House of Burgesses. Whether the suggestion of the measure 
came from the Massachusetts patriots is a matter which has 
been much disputed. It was so believed in Boston. 2 The 
measure was only a carrying out of the general policy first 
marked out by Samuel Adams in the "Instructions" of 1764, 
and the " Circular Letter " of 1768. In Bancroft's collection 
is contained an autograph letter of Samuel Adams written to 
the Virginian, Arthur Lee, then in London, September 27, 
1771, in which it is suggested that societies of correspondence 
shall be formed in different colonies with even a larger pur- 
pose than that of banding the colonies together. The sugges- 
tion is that they shall correspond with the " Society for the 



1 Daniel Leonard. 

2 Hutchinson : Manuscript letter in Mass. Archives, Apr. 19, 1773. 



46 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Toivn-Meeting. [248 

Maintenance of the Bill of Rights" in England, and so 
bring America into union with those in the mother-country, 
who were resisting the encroachments of the Prerogative. 
"This is a sudden thought," he writes, "and drops undi- 
gested from my pen. It would be an arduous task for any 
man to attempt to awaken a sufficient number in the colonies 
to so grand an undertaking. Nothing, however, should be 
despaired of." 1 Whether the Virginia patriots proceeded on 
their own motion or incited from elsewhere it is certain that 
Samuel Adams had regarded the banding together of the 
Massachusetts towns only as preliminary to uniting by simi- 
lar means the thirteen colonies. The train was laid for it all, 
though the execution of the purpose was delayed in the Mas- 
sachusetts Assembly by certain important events. It was 
greatly to the joy of Massachusetts that Virginia anticipated 
her. South and North must present an unbroken front. 
Virginia went forward and Massachusetts was at once at 
her side. 

As the struggle deepens the prominence of Samuel Adams 
becomes more marked. In the Assembly, he carries the 
American cause upon his shoulders, often almost alone ; but 
the town-meeting is his favorite sphere. There he is hardly 
less than supreme, and his most effective work finds its basis 
there. When Hutchinson calls him " Master of the Puppets," 
one feels that the language is extravagant. Other expressions, 
however, with which the letters of Hutchinson abound, the 
"All in All," the "Instar Omnium," the "Chief Incendiary," 
are scarcely less strong, and the expressions of those who 
loved him are as marked as those of the men who regarded 
him with hatred and terror. Generally it is as the manager 
somewhat withdrawn behind the figures that stand in the fore- 
ground that he is making himself felt. On that December 
night in 1773, when the town-meeting in the Old South, by 
the dim light of candles, wait for the return of Benjamin 

1 Copied from the manuscript. 



249] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 47 

Botch, owner of the tea-ship " Dartmouth/' from Milton, and 
even Josiah Quincy advises a temporizing course rather than 
decided action, Samuel Adams sits in the pulpit as Moderator. 
When presently the merchant enters and announces the gov- 
ernor's refusal to grant a pass to the ship, the words of the 
Moderator are : " This meeting can do nothing more to save 
the country ! " A war-whoop is heard from near the door ; 
the Mohawks rush, with the crowd at their heels, to Griffin's 
wharf, and presently through the stillness is heard the crash 
of the hatchets as the chests are broken in upon the decks of 
the vessel. Samuel Adams is not in the company, but his 
sentence from the chair was evidently the concerted signal for 
which all were waiting. Again, at the last great town-meet- 
ing before Lexington and Concord, March 6th, 1775, the fifth 
celebration of the Boston Massacre, while Warren is the 
heroic central figure, Samuel Adams is behind all as chief 
director. On that day Gage had in the town eleven regiments. 
Of trained soldiers there were scarcely fewer than the number 
of men on the patriot side ; and when Ave remember that 
many Tories throughout the Brovince, in the disturbed times, 
had sought refuge in Boston, under the protection of the 
troops, we can feel what a host there was that day on the side 
of the King. Nevertheless, all went forward as usual. The 
warrant appeared in due form for the meeting, at which an 
oration was to be delivered to commemorate the "horrid mas- 
sacre," and to denounce the "ruinous tendency of standing 
armies being placed in free and populous cities in time of 
peace." The Old South was densely thronged, and in the pulpit 
as Moderator once more, by the side of the town-clerk, William 
Cooper, quietly sat Samuel Adams. Among the citizens a 
large party of officers were present, intent, apparently, upon 
making a disturbance with the design of precipitating a con- 
flict. The war, it was thought, might as well begin then as 
at any time. Warren was late in appearing ; Samuel Adams 
sat meantime as if upon a powder-barrel that might at any 
minute roar into the air in a sudden explosion. The tradition 



\ 



48 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting, [250 

has come down that he was serene and unmoved. He quietly 
requested the townsmen to vacate the front seats into which 
he politely invited the soldiers, that they might be well 
placed to hear. The numbers were so large that they over- 
flowed the pews and many sat upon the pulpit stairs. War- 
ren came at last, entering through the window behind the 
pulpit to avoid the press, and at once began. A picturesque 
incident in the delivery of the oration w T as that, as Warren 
proceeded, a British captain, sitting on the pulpit stairs, held 
up in his open palm before Warren's face a number of pistol 
bullets. Warren quietly dropped his handkerchief upon them 
and went on. It was strange enough that that oration was 
given without an outbreak. "We wildly stare about," he 
says, " and with amazement ask ' Who spread this ruin around 
us ? ? What wretch has dared deface the image of his God ? 
Has haughty France or cruel Spain sent forth her myrmidons ? 
Has the grim savage rushed again from the far distant wilder- 
ness? Or does some fiend, fierce from the depth of Hell, 
with all the rancorous malice which the apostate damned can 
feel, twang her destructive bow and hurl her deadly arrows at 
our breast ? No, none of these ; but how astonishing ! It is 
the hand of Britain that inflicts the wound. The arms of 
George, our rightful King, have been employed to shed that 
blood, which freely should have flowed at his command, when 
justice, or the honor of his crown had called his subjects to the 
field." l The oration was given without disturbance, though 
the tension was tremendous. In the proceedings that followed, 
the quiet was not perfect, but the collision was averted for a 
time. The troops were not quite ready, and on the patriot 
side the presiding genius was as prudent as he was bold. 2 

1 Frothingham's Warren, p. 433. 

2 Hutchinson gives a new and interesting story respecting this memor- 
able town-meeting, in his Diary. " September 6, 1775, Col. James tells an 
odd story of the intention of the officers the 5 March, that 300 were in the 
meeting to hear Dr. Warren's oration : that if he had said anything against 
the King, &c, an officer was prepared, who stood near, with an egg, to have 



251] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting, 49 

Shortly after he sent the following quiet account to Richard 
Henry Lee in Virginia : 

Boston, March, 1775. 

On the sixth Instant, there was an Adjournment of our 
Town-meeting, when an Oration was delivered in Commemo- 
ration of the Massacre on the 5th of March, 1770. I had 
long expected they would take that occasion to beat up a 
Breeze, and therefore (having the Honor of being the Moder- 
ator of the Meeting, and seeing Many of the Officers present 
before the orator came in) I took care to have them treated 
with Civility, inviting them into convenient Seats, &c, that 
they might have no pretence to behave ill, for it is a good 
Maxim in Politicks as well as War, to put and keep the 
enemy in the wrong. They behaved tolerably well till the 
oration was finished, when upon a motion made for the 
appointment of another orator, they began to hiss, which 
irritated the assembly to the greatest Degree and Confusion 
ensued. They, however, did not gain their End, which was 
apparently to break up the Meeting, for order was soon 
restored, and we proceeded regularly and finished. I am 
persuaded that were it not for the Danger of precipitating a 
Crisis, not a Man of them would have been spared. It was 
provoking enough to them, that while there were so many 
Troops stationed here for the design of suppressing Town- 
meetings, there should yet be a Meeting for the purpose of 



thrown in his face, and that was to have been a signal to draw swords, and 
they would have massacred Hancock, Adams, and hundreds more ; and he 
added he wished they had. I am glad they did not : for I think it would 
have been an everlasting disgrace to attack a body of people without arms 
to defend themselves. 

" He says one officer cried ' Fy ! Fy ! ' and Adams immediately asked 
who dared say so ? And then said to the officer he should mark him. The 
officer answered ' And I will mark you. I live at such a place, and shall 
be ready to meet, you.' Adams said he would go to his General. The 
officer said his General had nothing to do with it ; the affair was between 
them two." Diary and Letters, pp. 528-529. 

4 



50 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [252 

delivering an oration to commemorate a Massacre perpetrated 
by Soldiers, and to show the Danger of standing Armies. 

SAMUEL ADAMS. 1 

It was but a few weeks now to the 19th of April, when 
Samuel Adams, flying with Hancock across the fields from 
Lexington to Woburn, exclaimed : " What a glorious morn- 
ing is this ! " On the 12th of June came Gage's proclamation, 
offering full pardon to every soul in America on condition of 
submission, " excepting only from the Benefit of such Pardon 
Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whose Offences are of too 
flagitious a Nature to admit of any other Consideration than 
that of condign Punishment." 2 

Samuel Adams, as a member of Congress, now enters upon 
a career, which takes him from the scene of his early activity. 
Both friends and enemies testify to the weight of his influence 
in the new sphere. According to Galloway, the able Pennsyl- 
vanian, who so much embarrassed the action of the first Con- 
gress, and afterwards stood strong on the royal side : "It was 
this man who, by his superior application, managed at once 
the faction in Congress at Philadelphia, and the faction in 
New England ; " and Jefferson wrote : "I always considered 
him more than any other man the fountain of our important 
measures." Yet he never attained before the nation the posi- 
tion which he had held in his own province and town. While 
his younger kinsman, John Adams, rapidly rose to eminence, 
he remained less distinguished in the body of delegates, which, 
as the war proceeded, gradually sank lower and lower in the 
estimation of the country. Possibly his abilities were better 
adapted to the arena of the Folk-mote than to that of a great 
representative body. Certainly his principles were such as to 
lead to embarrassment in the management of large affairs. 
His excessive dislike of delegated power, for instance, led 

1 Copied from the manuscript in Bancroft's collection. 

2 From Mr. Bancroft's copy of the Proclamation. 



253] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 51 

him to oppose the establishment of departments presided over 
by secretaries, and made him prefer, as the executive machin- 
ery of government, the more awkward form of committees. 
He set himself against a foreign office; against a depart- 
ment of War, to be presided over by Gen. Sullivan ; greatest 
mistake of all, against a bureau of Finance, with Robert 
Morris as the secretary. 

With the close of the war, Samuel Adams was consigned 
to poverty and comparative obscurity. Age was fast coming 
upon him ; an estrangement with Hancock, whose star was in 
the ascendant, helped to throw him into the background ; the 
tendency toward aristocratic forms and a government strongly 
centralized, which, after the rebellion of Shays, became very 
marked in Massachusetts, brought into disrepute the great 
arch-democrat. Yet Samuel Adams was rarely unreasonable 
in his advocacy. In the dismal time of the Shays trouble he 
stood stoutly for law and order against the vast popular con- 
spiracy. The insurgents had powerful backing and the 
means employed were not greatly different from those used 
before the war against British aggression. "Now that we 
have regular and constitutional government," said Samuel 
Adams, "popular committees and county conventions are not 
only useless but dangerous. They served an excellent pur- 
pose and were highly necessary when they were set up, and I 
shall not repent the small share I then took in them." He 
declared for the sternest measures in support of the laws. At 
the head of Boston town-meeting, which he guided in the old 
way as Moderator, and whose spokesman he became in the 
crisis, he strengthened the hands of his noble old colleague 
Bowdoin, now become Governor, in the most decisive course. 
" In monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit 
of being pardoned or lightly punished; but the man who 
dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer 
death." 

In the matter of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, 
his position was not at all that of Patrick Henry and Richard 



52 Samuel Adams, the Man 0/ the Town-Meeting. [254 

Henry Lee, who opposed it with all their power. He received 
it hesitatingly, and suggested amendments looking toward a 
diminution of what he felt to be a dangerous tendency toward 
centralization. He never, however, set himself against it ; 
indeed, it was only through his influence that Massachusetts 
was at length induced to adopt it. 1 

The neglect and obloquy of which the old man had become 
the subject were pitiful. There is still in existence the note, 
written in a rude hand upon common paper, the letters run 
together while lying upon the wet grass of his garden into 
which it had been thrown, in which Samuel Adams is warned 
to expect assassination. He remained, indeed, the public 
servant, but in positions comparatively inconspicuous, while 
men, whose fortunes he had made, were in the places of honor. 
But before it was too late, the whirligig of time had begun to 
bring in its revenges. A strong effort was made to send him 
once more to Congress, as the administration of Washington 
began under the just-adopted Constitution. The effort was 
unsuccessful, but the canvass awoke the hearts of the people 
to a better appreciation of their well-tried servant. To the 
man of to-day, such a conjunction as the setting side by side 
of the names of Washington and Samuel Adams seems little 
less than ludicrous. It was not absurd in those days. Say 
the writers : "While we are careful to introduce to our Federal 
Legislature the American Fabius, let us not be unmindful of 
the American Cato." He became lieutenant-governor, and, in 
1793, governor, a post which he occupied through successive 
re-elections until 1797, when he retired from public service at 
the a^e of 75. Could he have lived another life, a brilliant 
recognition would probably have fallen to him. The forces 



Bancroft: Hist, of Constitution, II., 261. 

In a private letter to the writer, Mr. Bancroft says: "Point out the error 
that many have made in saying that he was at first opposed to the Consti- 
tution. He never was opposed to the Constitution; he only waited to 
make up his mind." 



255] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 53 

of Federalism were growing exhausted ; the incoming wave 
of " Democracy " would certainly have lifted him into a place 
of power. Already in 1796, Virginia cast for him in the 
Electoral College fifteen votes for the Presidency, putting him 
next to Jefferson, to whom she gave twenty; and, in 1801, 
when at length the change had come, Jefferson, just elected, 
wrote to the octogenarian : " How much I lament that time 
has deprived me of your aid ! It would have been a day of 
glory which should have called you to the first office of my 
administration. But give us your counsel, my friend, and 
give us your blessing; and be assured that there exists 
not in the heart of man a more faithful esteem than mine 
to you." x 

Only once in his old age did the uncompromising Puritan 
so far forget himself as to fall into an inconsistency. As 
governor, he felt that his function was simply executive, to 
carry out the will of the people and their representatives in 
the legislature, and that it was a usurpation for such a magis- 
trate to interpose his veto to thwart their action or in any 
other way to proceed independently. But efforts were made 
to open a theatre in Boston ! The legislature passed an act 
prohibiting it, upon which the people in town-meeting de- 
manded its repeal. This the old man fought on the floor of 
Faneuil Hall, till his voice was drowned in a roar of opposi- 
tion. The demand for repeal was made to which the legisla- 
ture listened. But the stout Independent whose strictness 
was only to be matched by the toughest of the covenanters or 
the most unbending of the Ironsides, in his gubernatorial 
capacity vetoed the repeal. The Puritan and the politician 
for once were in conflict, and the Puritan carried the day. 
For himself he indulged in no amusement but psalm-sing- 
ing ; his dear Boston he would have a " Christian Sparta," 
similarly limited in its recreations ; to save the town from 
going to the dogs, any sacrifice could be made. 

1 From the manuscript in Bancroft's Collection. 



54 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting, [256 

He was narrow, over subtle, perhaps, in the expedients 
which he sometimes employed, slow in recognizing the ways 
through which, in a vast republic like ours, all large affairs 
must be administered. But America has had few public men 
as devoted and, on the whole, as wise as he. From first to 
last, one can detect in him no thought of personal gain or 
fame. He was so poor, that when he went to the First Con- 
tinental Congress in 1774, his friends were obliged to buy 
him clothes that he might make a respectable appearance. 
His wife sometimes supported the family, while he worked 
for the town or state. He lived in his latter years in the 
confiscated house of a Tory which was given him rent-free as 
an offset to claims he had for public service. It would have 
been necessary at last to support and bury him at the public 
charge, had he not inherited from his only son, an army sur- 
geon who died at 37, claims against the government which 
yielded about six thousand dollars. This sum, fortunately 
invested, sufficed for the simple wants of himself and his 
faithful wife. As careless was he in regard to his position 
before his co temporaries and in history. Time and again the 
credit for great measures which he originated was given to 
men who were simply his agents, and there was never a 
remonstrance from him; time and again men whom he 
brought forward from obscurity, to set here or there, with 
scarcely more volition of their own than so many chess-men, 
stood in an eminence before the world which is not yet lost, 
obscuring the real master. Papers which would have estab- 
lished his title to a position among the greatest, he destroyed 
by his own hand or left at hap-hazard. He died October 2, 
1803. Political rancor pursued him to the last. There was 
embarrassment in procuring a suitable escort for the funeral ; 
the legislature of Massachusetts did him scant honor; even 
to-day his grave in the Granary burying-ground, in the heart 
of the town that he so much loved, is marked slightly, if 
at all. 



257] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting, 55 

The Town-Meeting To-day. 

Though the Town-meeting of the New England of to-day 
rarely presents all the features of the Town-meeting of the 
Bevolution, yet wherever the population has remained toler- 
ably pure from foreign admixture, and wherever the numbers 
at the same time have not become so large as to embarrass, 
the institution retains much of its old vigor. The writer 
recalls the life, as it was twenty-five years ago, of a most 
venerable and uncontaminated old town, whose origin dates 
back more than two hundred years. At first it realized 
almost perfectly the idea of the Teutonic " tun." For long 
it was the frontier settlement, with nothing to the west but 
woods until the fierce Mohawks were reached, and nothing 
but woods to the north until one came to the hostile French 
of Canada. About the houses, therefore, was drawn the pro- 
tection of a palisade to enclose them (tynan) against attack. 
Though not without some foreign intermixture, the old stock 
was, twenty-five years ago, so far unchanged that in the 
various "deestricks" the dialect was often unmistakeably 
nasal; the very bob-o-links in the meadow-grass, and the 
bumble-bees in the holly-hocks might have been imagined to 
chitter and hum with a Yankee twang; and "Zekle" squired 
" Huldy," as of yore, to singing-school or apple-paring, to 
quilting or sugaring-off, as each season brought its appropri- 
ate festival. The same names stood for the most part on tax, 
voting, and parish lists that stood there in the time of Philip's 
war, when for a space the people were driven out by the 
Indian pressure; and the fathers had handed down to the 
modern day, with their names and blood, the venerable 
methods by which they regulated their lives. On the north- 
ern boundary a factory village had sprung up about a water- 
power ; at the south, too, five miles off there was some rattle 
of mills and sound of hammers. For the most part, how- 
ever, the people were farmers, like their ancestors, reaping 
great hay-crops in June with which to fat in the stall long 



56 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [258 

rows of sleek cattle for market in December ; or by farmer's 
alchemy, transmuting the clover of the rocky hills into 
golden butter. 

From far and near, on the first March-Monday, the men 
gathered to the central village, whose people made great 
preparations for the entertainment of the people of the out- 
skirts. What old Yankee, wherever he may have strayed, 
will not remember the " town-meeting ginger-bread," and 
the great roasts that smoked hospitably for all comers ! The 
sheds of the meeting-house close by were crowded with horses 
and sleighs ; for, in the intermediate slush, between ice and 
the spring mud, the runner was likely to be better than the 
wheel. The floor of the town-hall grew wet and heavy in 
the trampling ; not in England alone is the land represented ; 
a full representation of the soil comes to a New England 
town-meeting, — on the boots of the freemen. On a platform 
at the end of the plain room sat the five selectmen in a row, — 
at their left the venerable town-clerk, with the ample volume 
of records before him. His memory went back to the men 
who were old in Washington's administration, who in their 
turn remembered men in whose childhood the French and 
Indians burned the infant settlement. Three lives, the town- 
clerk's the third, spanned the whole history of the town. He 
was full of traditions, precedents, minutiae of town history, 
an authority in all disputed points of procedure from whom 
there was no appeal. In front of the row of selectmen with 
their brown, solid farmer faces, stood the Moderator, a vigor- 
ous man in the forties, six straight feet in height, colonel of 
the county regiment of militia, of a term's experience in the 
General Court, thus conversant with parliamentary law, a 
quick and energetic presiding officer. 

It was indeed an arena. The south village was growing 
faster than the " Street," and there were rumors of efforts to 
be made to move the town-hall from its old place, which 
aroused great wrath ; and both south village and " Street " 
took it hard that part of the men of the districts to the 



259] Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. 57 

north, had favored a proposition to be set off to an adjoining 
town. The weak side of human nature came out as well as 
the strong in the numerous jealousies and bickerings. Fol- 
lowing the carefully arranged programme or warrant, from 
which there could be no departure, because ample warning 
must be given of every measure proposed, item after item 
was considered, — a change here in the course of the highway 
to the shire town, how much should be raised by taxes, the 
apportionment of money among the school districts, what 
bounty the town would pay its quota of troops for the war, a 
new wing for the poor-house, whether there should be a 
bridge at the west ford. Now and then came a touch of 
humor, as when the young husbands, married within the 
year, were elected field-drivers, officers taking the place of 
the ancient hog-reeves. Once the Moderator for the time- 
being displeased the meeting by his ruling as regards certain 
points of order. " Mr. Moderator," cried out an ancient citi- 
zen with a twang in his voice like that of a well-played jews- 
harp, " ef it's in awrder, I'd jest like to inquire the price of 
cawn at Cheapside." Another rustic Cicero whom for some 
reason the physicians of the village had displeased, once filled 
up a lull in proceedings with : " Mr. Moderator, I move that 
a dwelling be erected in the centre of the grave-yard in which 
the doctors of the town be required to reside, that they may 
have always under their eyes the fruits of their labors." 

The talkers were sometimes fluent, sometimes stumbling and 
awkward. The richest man in the town, at the same time 
town-treasurer, was usually a silent looker-on. His son, 
however, president of the county agricultural society, an enter- 
prising farmer, whose team was the handsomest, whose oxen 
the fattest, whose crops the heaviest, was in speech forceful 
and eloquent, with an energetic word to say on every ques- 
tion. But he was scarcely more prominent in the dis- 
cussions than a poor broom-corn raiser, whose tax was only 
a few dollars. There was the intrigue of certain free-thinkers 
to oust the ministers from the school-committee, — the 
manoeuvring of the factions to get hold of the German 



58 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting, [260 

colony, a body of immigrants lately imported into the factory- 
village to the north. These sat in a solid mass to one side 
while the proceedings went on in an unknown tongue, without 
previous training for such work, voting this way or that 
according to the direction of two or three leaders. 

Watching it all, one could see how perfect a democracy it 
was. Things were often done far enough from the best way. 
Unwise or doubtful men were put in office, important projects 
stinted by niggardly appropriations, unworthy prejudices 
allowed to interfere with wise enterprises. Yet in the main 
the result was good. This was especially to be noted, — how 
thoroughly the public spirit of those who took part was stimu- 
lated, and how well they were trained to self-reliance, intelli- 
gence of various kinds, and love for freedom. The rough 
blacksmith or shoemaker, who had his say as to what should 
be the restriction about the keeping of dogs, or the pasturing 
of sheep on the western hills, spoke his mind in homely 
fashion enough, and possibly recommended some course not 
the wisest. That he could do so, however, helped his self- 
respect, caused him to take a deeper interest in affairs beyond 
himself, than if things were managed without a right on his 
part to interfere ; and this gain in self-respect, public spirit, 
self-reliance, to the blacksmith and shoemaker is worth far 
more than a mere smooth or cheap carrying-on of affairs. 

Is there anything more valuable among Anglo-Saxon insti- 
tutions than this same ancient Folk-mote, this old-fashioned 
New England Town-meeting? What a list of important 
men can be cited who have declared in the strongest terms 
that tongue can utter their conviction of its preciousness I 1 .It 



1 John Stuart Mill : Eepresentative Government, p. 64, etc. De Tocque- 
ville : De la Democratic en Amerique, I. p. 96, etc. J. Toulmin Smith : 
Local Self-Go vernment and Centralization, p. 29, etc. May : Constitutional 
History of England, II. 460. Bluntschli: quoted by H. B. Adams, Germanic 
Origin of JSF. E. Towns. Jefferson : to Kercheval, July 12, 1816, and to 
Cabell, Feb. 2, 1816. John Adams : Letter to his Wife, Oct. 29, 1775. 
Samuel Adams : Letter to Noah Webster, April 30, 1784. B. W. Emerson: 
Concord Bicentennial Discourse, 1835, etc., etc. 



261] Samuel Adams, (he Man of the Town-Meeting, 59 

has been alleged that to this more than anything else was due 
the supremacy of England in America, the successful coloniza- 
tion out of which grew at last the United States. France 
failed precisely for want of this. 1 England prevailed precisely 
because "nations which are accustomed to township institu- 
tions and municipal goverment are better able than any other 
to found prosperous colonies. The habit of thinking and 
governing for one's self is indispensable in a new country." 
So says De Tocqueville, seeking an explanation for the failure 
of his own race and the victory of its great rival. 2 None 
have admired this thorough New England democracy more 
heartily than those living under a very different polity. 
Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, wrote in admiration of 
Massachusetts, 3 — " where yet I hope to finish the remainder of 
my days. The hasty, unpersevering, aristocratic genius of 
the South suits not my disposition, and is inconsistent with 
my views of what must constitute social happiness and 
security." Jefferson becomes almost fierce in the earnestness 
with which he urges Virginia to adopt the township. " Those 
wards, called townships in New England, are the vital prin- 
ciple of their governments, and have proved themselves the 
wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the 
perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation. 
.... As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the 
words ' Carthago delenda est/ so do I every opinion with the 
injunction : ' Divide the counties into wards ! ' " 4 

The town-meeting has been called " the primordial cell of 
our body-politic." Is its condition at present such as to 
satisfy us? As we have seen, even in New England, it is 
only here and there that it can be said to be well-maintained. 
At the"' South, Anglo-Saxon freedom, like the enchanted 



1 Lecky : Hist. XVIIIth Century, I., 387. 

2 Be la Dem. en Am., I., 423. 

3 Life of E. H. Lee : Letter to John Adams, Oct. 7, 1779, I., p. 226. 

4 Works, VI., 544; VII., 13. 



60 Samuel Adams, the Man of the Town-Meeting. [262 

prince of the Arabian Nights, whose body below the waist 
the evil witch had fixed in black marble, has been fixed in 
African slavery. The spell is destroyed ; the prince has his 
limbs again, but they are weak and wasted from the hideous 
trammel. The traces of the Folk-mote in the South are 
sadly few. Nor elsewhere is the prospect encouraging. The 
influx of alien tides to whom our precious heir-looms are as 
nothing, the growth of cities and the inextricable perplexities 
of their government, the vast inequality of condition between 
man and man — what room is there for the little primary 
council of freemen, homogeneous in stock, holding the same 
faith, on the same level as to wealth and station, not too few 
in number for the kindling of interest, not so many as to 
become unmanageable — what room is there for it, and how 
can it be revivified or created? It is perhaps hopeless to 
think of it. Mr. Freeman remarks that in some of the 
American colonies " representation has supplanted the primi- 
tive Teutonic democracy which had sprung into life in the 
institutions of the first settlers." Over vast areas of our 
country, representation, to-day, has supplanted democracy. 
It is an admirable, an indispensable expedient, of course. 
Yet that a representative system may be thoroughly well 
managed, we need below it the primary assemblies of the 
individual citizens, " regular, fixed, frequent, and accessible," 
discussing affairs and deciding for themselves. De Tocque- 
ville seems to have thought that Anglo-Saxon America owes 
its existence to the Town-meeting. It would be hard, at any 
rate, to show that the Town-meeting was not a main source 
of our freedom. Certainly, it is well to hold it in memory ; 
to give it new life, if possible, wherever it exists ; to repro- 
duce some semblance of it, however faint, in the regions to 
which it is unknown ; it is well to brush the dust off the 
half-forgotten historic figure who, of all men, is its best type 
and representative. 



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I Volume, i2mo. Cloth, $2.00. 



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CONTENTS OF FIRST SERIES. 

1883. 

The First Series of University Studies, originally announced as twelve 
monographic numbers embracing 800 to 400 pages, is now complete. It com- 
prises 470 pages and twenty distinct papers collected in twelve special groups. 
Subscribers have also been furnished with a complete Index to the first volume 
of the Studies and with a general title-page, including the special sub-heading 
Local Institutions, which may serve to characterize the contents of the first vol- 
ume, now ready for binding. An examination of the List of Studies in the 
First Series, herewith appended, will show the lines of investigation which 
have already been opened by the Johns Hopkins University in the field of 
American Institutional History. The Studies will advance from Local Gov- 
ernment to City and State Government, and will enter the domain of National 
Institutions. University study of American Economics will also advance 
along these lines. 

I. An Introduction to American Institutional History. By Edward 

A. Freeman, D.C.L., LL.D., Kegius Professor of Modern History, Uni- 
versity of Oxford. With an account of Mr. Freeman's Visit to Balti- 
more, by the Editor. 

II. The Germanic Origin of New England Towns. Eead before the 

Harvard Historical Society, May 9, 1881. By H. B. Adams, Ph. D. 
Heidelberg, 1876. With Notes on Co-operation in University Work. 

III. Local Government in Illinois. First published in the Fortnightly 

Eeview. By Albert Shaw, A. B. Iowa College, 1879. — Local Gov- 
ernment in Pennsylvania. Eead before the Pennsylvania Historical 
Society, May 1, 1882. By E. E. L. Gould, A. B. Victoria University, 
Canada, 1882. Price 30 cents. 

IV. Saxon Tithingmen in America. Eead before the American Antiqua- 

rian Society, October 21, 1881. By H. B. Adams. 

V. Local Government in Michigan, and the Northwest. Eead before the 

Social Science Association, at Saratoga, September 7, 1882. By E. W. 
Bemis, A. B. Amherst College, 1880. Price 25 cents. 

VI. Parish Institutions of Maryland. Published in abridged form in the 

Magazine of American History. By Edward Ingle, A. B. Johns 
Hopkins University, 1882. With Illustrations from Parish Eecords. 
Price 40 cents. 

VII. Old Maryland Manors. Eead before the Historical and Political 
Science Association, March 30, 1883. Published also in Lewis Mayer's 
» Ground Eents in Maryland," (Cushings & Bailey, Baltimore, 1883). By 
John Johnson, A. B. Johns Hopkins University, 1881. Price 30 cents. 

VIII. Norman Constables in America. Eead before the New England 
Historic, Genealogical Society, February 1, 1882. By H. B. Adams. 

IX-X. Village Communities of Cape Anne and Salem. From the His- 
torical Collections of the Essex Institute. By IL. B. Adams. 

XI. The Genesis of a New England State (Connecticut.) Eead before 

the Historical and Political Science Association, April 13, 1883. By 
Alexander Johnston, A. M. Eutgers College, 1870 ; Professor of Politi- 
cal Economy and Jurisprudence at Princeton College. Price 30 cents. 

XII. Local Government and Free Schools in South Carolina. Eead 
in part before the Historical Society of South Carolina, December 15, 
1882. By B. J. Eamage, A. B. Price 40 cents. 



PRICE LIST OF SECOND SERIES. 

1884. 

MI. Methods of Historical Study. By Herbert B.Adams, Ph. D. (Heidel- 
berg). January and February, 1884; pp. 137. Price 50 cents. 

III. The Past and the Present of Political Economy. By Eichard T. 

Ely, Ph. D. (Heidelberg). March, 1884; pp. 64. Price 35 cents. 

IV. Samuel Adams, The Man of the Town Meeting. By James K. Hos- 

mer, A. M. (Harvard) ; Professor of English and German Literature, Wash- 
ington University, St. Louis. April, 1884 ; pp. 60. Price 35 cents. 

V. Taxation in the United States. By Henry Carter Adams, Ph. D. 

(Baltimore) ; Professor of Political Economy, Cornell University. In press. 

VI. The Institutional Beginnings of a Western State. By Jesse Macy, 

A. B. (Iowa College) ; Professor of Historical and Political Science, Iowa 
College. In press. 



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